PM's greed-is-bad credo

IT'S hard to take Kevin Rudd's studied look of concern over the global financial meltdown seriously, even given the severity of events. The problem is that the prime ministerial call to arms is undermined by Labor's grossly inconsistent approach to fiscal matters.

An excellent example of this is Rudd's populist rallying cry over corporate greed. A headline-grabber if ever there was one, his "greed is bad" statement would have sounded the right sort of note if Labor (joined by the Opposition) had not thrice voted against taking actions which would have restricted the earnings and benefits of high-fliers. These are not historical cases either; the most recent votes to keep the gravy trains rolling came just last week, following an earlier unsuccessful bid last month, all put forward in the Senate by the leader of the Greens, Bob Brown. If, by implication, greed is good, or at least acceptable in September, why is it suddenly dastardly in October? Rudd, true to form, has provided no paperwork to support his sudden conversion to the greed-is-bad camp, but arrant populism is probably a good enough reason for him, given the manner in which he roller-skated into the prime ministership with his promises to provide every school pupil with a computer, bring down fuel prices, bring down grocery prices, make housing affordable and halt inflation. The reality is that the federal Government doesn't have the mechanisms to cap executive salaries, and the decisions on such salaries are a matter for boards and shareholders. Rudd should know this, of course, being one-half of a marriage that is estimated to gross more than $2 million a year, although, as The Australian Financial Review noted in March, the family would not have had to declare the $942,000 in franked dividends Rudd's wife Therese Rein received in the 2005-06 financial year from her work placement firm Ingeus on top of her chief executive's salary. The flip-flop on executive salaries is by no means the only evidence of Labor's inconsistency in recent times. The allocation of the one-off payments to pensioners in the $10.4 billion crisis rescue package (again unsupported by any back-up documentation) also flouts Labor's earlier views that such payments (when proposed by other political parties) are poison. As early as May 2004, Wayne Swan, then Opposition family and community services spokesman, enunciated Labor's position. "We're not interested in one-off payments for anything," Swan said then. "We're interested in a family payment system that eases the financial pressure on families and gives them the income when they need it - on a weekly, fortnightly and monthly basis. "We're not interested in one-off bribes like the government." No ambiguity or nuance there. And, just last year, Swan reprised his view in a scathing pre-budget attack on his esteemed and highly successful predecessor Peter Costello. Calling a press conference on the evening before the budget was handed down, Swan came out sneering. "We see in the papers today lots of one-off payments," he said. "Now, if we're going to have a series of one-off payments, that will mean the Budget is really about the future of the government politically and not the future of the nation economically. "I think people will need to ask themselves the question, why is it that these one-off payments only turn up every May in election years? Why is it only Christmas in May in election years? "So one-off payments tend to be an indicator that the government is more interested in its political survival than it is in the long-term national interest of economic development and prosperity." And as Rudd said during his campaign launch speech last November: "Today I'm saying loud and clear that this sort of reckless spending must stop. "I have said that I will spend less than Mr Howard, that I will not match his spending dollar for dollar, and that I am an economic conservative." And Labor is not? It has escaped only a few observers that the one-off bonanza to be delivered to pensioners under the Rudd rescue plan is only marginally greater than the $30 one-off payment that former Opposition leader Brendan Nelson proposed they should be awarded until Labor overhauled the pension system. A matter of two months ago, Rudd and Swan were opposed to any such payment to pensioners, deriding the proposal in a manner that was utterly lacking in any compassion. They have now found a means of recovering from that position, at least monetarily, but there is still a huge compassion deficit. The pair look like fiscal fools as they blunder on. This doesn't say a lot for arguments which or may not have been put to them by their principal adviser, Treasury Secretary Ken Henry, who, when not rescuing the hairy-nosed wombat, is showing himself to be now far more proactive than he ever was under the Howard-Costello team. Labor did, however, inherit one of the most envied economies in the world. Any train wreck ahead, including a slump in GDP and a rise in unemployment, will have been engineered, in part, by their foolhardy policies.