Friday, 30 November 2012 - 10:43am

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Published by Matthew Davidson on Fri, 30/11/2012 - 10:43am

In all seriousness, this is nuts. Decoding this "plan" from euphemisms back into English, we have:

  • Rolling back the government's feeble gestures in the direction of environmental responsibility, because obviously climate change is a lie masterminded by [insert name of favoured global conspiracy here].
  • Cutting taxes on the local wealthy (Gina wants her driveway pebbledashed with diamonds - very tasteful) and foreign corporations.
  • Cutting wages and conditions for workers.
  • Cutting government services and support for the needy.
  • Subsidising transport costs for big business, because why should Gina pay for shipping our non-renewable resources overseas?

This is all textbook, long-discredited, supply-side, trickle-down, voodoo economics serving no purpose except class warfare. If there were problems with investment and production, we'd be seeing inflation, and we're just not. I'm no fan of Labor, but "the weakest jobs growth in more than a decade" is not a bad result compared to other wealthy countries who have followed the gifts-for-the-wealthy-austerity-for-the-rest prescription as proposed above since 2008. The GFC is a demand crisis, and what you do in a demand crisis is raise taxes on the wealthy, increase income support to the poor, and increase spending on infrastructure that serves the needs of the local population, not mining companies.

I'd be surprised if early drafts didn't also include cracking down on illegal latino immigration, since this is a near-verbatim copy of the Romney-Ryan "plan". Here's wishing the coalition the same degree of success, for all our sakes.

Update: This just in: the AFR reports the resources boom is "faltering faster than expected", which is pretty much - erm - as expected. So from here on in, you can subsidise, cut taxes, and flog workers all you want, but it's not going to make the Chinese buy raw materials for products they don't plan to manufacture, and couldn't sell if they did. And also as expected, the knock-on effects elsewhere in the Australian economy are already evident.