Alan Jones: we are heading towards a mountain of COVID-related debt
Coronavirus has killed barely more than 100 Australians yet our governments are wreaking economic havoc over a disease that in 98per cent of cases causes mild symptoms, writes Alan Jones.
Opinion
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The prime minister, at the last election, talked about believing in miracles. The latest miracle is that Australians have remained so patient in the wake up of constant lectures from ventriloquial political leaders, who never question the so-called “health advice” on coronavirus.
Figures are trotted out, dates are laid down with almost biblical truth, yet there is never a single piece of paper that justifies why we are being asked to continue with draconian restrictions.
Now it’s Victoria with further infections over the weekend and, of course, axiomatically, further restrictions. Queensland then follows suit while barefacedly admitting that because of their restrictions, 168,000 Queenslanders have lost their jobs in the last three months.
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This, at a time when Spain has reopened all of its borders to visitors from most of Europe.
British tourists are being allowed in without having to quarantine.
The alarmists would cite Spain’s COVID-19 death toll at 28,322. What they won’t tell you is that almost 500,000 people die in Spain every year.
No one tells us that on average, there are 161,000 deaths in Australia each year.
That is over 440 per day. We have lost 102 people through coronavirus in six months.
But we still breathlessly record every case unearthed without any recognition of the World Health Organisation’s constant assertion that 98 per cent of these cases are mild.
Of course, it depends on which “experts” you talk to.
Professor David Katz, the founding director of the Yale University Prevention Research Centre has warned us: “I am deeply concerned that social, economic and public health consequences of this near total meltdown of normal life will be long-lasting and calamitous, possibly graver than the direct toll of the virus itself. The employment, impoverishment and despair likely to result will be public health scourges of the first order.”
The media and all politicians seem to be allies in all this where predicted catastrophe and alarmism seem to have no limit. The public has been brainwashed and indoctrinated.
As Maurice Newman wrote recently: “Lost in all the noise is how easy it has been for those with despotic tendencies to take away our freedoms … all they needed was a climate of fear and the long arm of the law.”
The greatest source of fear ought to be how we are ever likely to recover from bowing to the dictates of these government leaders citing arbitrary figures.
The International Monetary Fund is talking about a high-speed economic train crash that will see unemployment, debt, and bankruptcies soar more suddenly than ever before. We are in serious territory.
The figures ought to have us marching in the streets.
To offset the government shutdown of the economy, our spending is estimated at almost 10.6 per cent of GDP.
This is more than anything proposed by any other developing or developed nation.
It is double that of Canada; more than triple that of Britain. India’s total support is 0.7 per cent of GDP.
How in anybody’s name is this money going to be repaid when we have not yet calculated the cost of jobs lost forever, businesses closed which will never open again, a looming mental health crisis as people struggle silently to cope and then the cost of family violence, crime and drug abuse — no government can borrow like this without stretching the patience of the public and the capacity of the economy beyond any reasonable limit.
Is this a Liberal administration of small government, less regulation and personal freedoms?
What is socialism if not the willingness to embrace, unapologetically, mountains of debt, massive government, massive spending and endless schemes handing out money.
As the former deputy leader of the federal Liberal Party Neil Brown QC wrote recently: “All designed to turn the population into a nation of zombies with their tongues hanging out for a free drink.”
Is this the party of free enterprise or free handouts? How tall is this spending mountain?
Remember when the same Liberal people, then in Opposition, went after Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard during the GFC and their stimulus package?
We had pink-batts, cash for clunkers, building the education revolution, and, in the end, the public saw this as socialism gone mad.
Well, the Rudd and Gillard governments spent $51 billion during the GFC in one year. At its peak, the spending was 1.8 per cent of the size of the Australian economy. The coronavirus response will cost an estimated 3.3 per cent of our GDP this year and 6.1 per cent next year; and these are conservative figures based on forecasts that are likely to worsen.
Put this another way.
The Rudd and Gillard governments spent, on average, about $2900 per person, in today’s dollars, to keep the economy afloat.
The Morrison government’s pledges, so far, amount to about $7600 per person and that does not include the decision to bankroll childcare centres.
And it does not include the cost of state and territory governments propping up their economies to the tune of approximately $450 per Australian.
Remember, in six months, there have been 102 deaths, yet our spend is greater than the combined federal government spending on education, defence, interest on public debt, transport and communication, public order and safety and housing and community amenities.
And consider the mind-bending fact that there are over 200,000 businesses with delayed mortgage payments of $160 billion.
How are those debts going to be retired when normal payments resume in September?
Our so-called “leaders” are pretending to solve the wrong problem. We are not facing a health crisis — 98 per cent of these cases, wherever they occur, are mild.
What is not mild is the economic carnage in front of us.