Labor, Coalition auctioning off our future with big money promises
The Coalition will lose a bidding war with Labor. It’s the young couple bidding for the derelict semi with a tight budget. Labor’s the slick property developer pulling up in the Porsche.
Opinion
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$8.5 billion here, $9 billion there.
Pretty soon, as the saying goes, you’re talking about real money.
For voters hoping that the coming election contest would be one where there was a choice between big spending and fiscal discipline, Sunday was to say the least a disappointment.
Looking to shut down a repeat of Labor’s previous Mediscare campaigns, the Coalition promised to put “a historic $9 billion” into Medicare, upping Labor’s ante by a cool half-bill.
Quizzed about the fiscal prudence of such a pledge, one Coalition source simply shrugged and said, “we had to, mate’.
And, let’s be clear, Labor is worse.
Their $8.5 billion pledge comes on top of many more billions set to go out the door including subsidies and bailouts for industries from aluminium to Rex Airlines, to say nothing of the elusive tooth fairy known as green hydrogen.
Look, John Howard was fond of saying you can’t fatten a pig on market day and it’s a bit late in the piece to start having a high-minded discussion about different philosophies of government.
But if the Coalition gets into bidding wars with Labor, they will surely lose: They are the young couple bidding for the derelict semi Saturday morning with a very tight budget, Labor is the slick property developer who’s just pulled up in his Porsche.
Perhaps instead they should start dealing in hard truths.
Like, the only way out of our economic doldrums is to shrink the size of the state, and give the private sector room to breathe.
An easy analogy for the Coalition to make would be the housing market, where supply is crimped by overbearing, contradictory, and sometimes insane regulation at every level.
This is the one bit of classical economic orthodoxy accepted by the left, so it is good ground from which to take the analogy further.
As with housing, across the private sector over-regulation and bureaucracy is a dead weight on established businesses and threatens to strangle new ones before they get going because it’s all too hard.
Today government eats up a historically high share of GDP, productivity is in the toilet, and for all Labor’s crowing about jobs growth, almost all of those jobs are tied directly or indirectly to government spending (think NDIS).
Meanwhile our living standards – real disposable income – have cratered, and the only thing that seems to be keeping things churning is massive migration numbers which even one ABC commentator admitted last week were now driven by the demands of developers, business and universities.
There’s not long to go but it would be nice to see some real specifics from the Coalition around fixing this, whether it is slashing back regulation or fixing the bracket creep that takes more out of our pay packets every time Labor boasts about growing wages.
Of course that would require more than just opening the chequebook to fight off the inevitable Labor attacks that the Coalition wanted to “make workers less safe” or put more money in the pockets of “the big end of town.”
We can only live in hope.
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