Out-of-control spending a gift of the career politicians

With pre-election giveaways at free steak knife levels, it doesn’t take a complete cynic to suspect that the priority of this, and perhaps all recent governments, is to get re-elected.

At face value this may seem reasonable; one cannot govern from opposition and, theoretically, they believe their policies are in our nation’s best interests. However, even a person of modest intellect can see that our spending is out of control, our productivity is going in the wrong direction and we are generating many more jobs in the public sector than the private. Tough measures would seem prudent. However, if re-election trumps sane policy, then steak knives it is.

Is it time to consider limited terms? If the lure of the golden trough is such a siren, then perhaps we need to accept human nature and ensure the career politician goes the way of the typewriter. Two terms.

Do your best to make a positive impact on your nation. Then return to work. Ditto staffers. Don’t settle in. Give good, frank, wise advice for two terms. Then back to reality.

Personally, I’d limit staffers to those of post-partying age. And dump the Senate. But now I’m just dreaming.

Jane Bieger, Mount Lawley, WA

Greg Sheridan is correct in his critique of Peter Dutton (“Dutton as weak as Labor if he doesn’t commit to defence”, 24/3).

Dutton’s rising star is shining less brightly as the election looms closer each week. He gave voters hope. Hope that he would be stronger and more assertive than the weak, woke Anthony Albanese. Hope that he would not replicate Labor’s profligate spending. Hope that almost every policy was not constructed to merely garner votes from various sectors of the electorate.

Most of all, Dutton represented hope for a strong leader to steer the country off the rocks on which it has landed after only three years of Labor.

Sadly, Dutton’s image as a strong and forceful leader has been diminishing as he has shown that, like Albanese, he is an appeaser and not a statesman.

Unless he can reverse his sinking standing among uncommitted voters during the campaign, the hope that Dutton once held for so many Australians will end in an election result ushering in a new Labor-Greens-teals government.

Paul Clancy, Adelaide

The supporters of Peter Dutton are probably rubbing their hands in glee while reading that Jim Chalmers is taking the budget “into red zone with no way out” (24/3). At the close of 2021, the Intergenerational Report stated there would be no budget surplus for many years.

We know what followed. After nine consecutive deficits from the Coalition, Chalmers came up with two budget surpluses in his first two years as Treasurer. What a turnaround. Who says he will never do it again?

Frank Carroll, Moorooka, Qld

In the pre-election period we are about to enter, much will be made of the new budget deficit.

The usual claims and counterclaims will be made to hide the blatant reality that this country, like most of the Western world, suffers from a leadership deficit that is a far worse burden to carry than fiscal inefficiency.

For decades now, the cultural Marxists have slowly poisoned Western societies in numerous ways: wokeness, racism, Islamophobia, misogyny – the list goes on. One of the pernicious changes that it also has wrought is to make political service extremely unattractive to the most capable and to facilitate the rise of those people who exhibit less praiseworthy personal characteristics. Wisdom, competence, honesty and other more noble qualities decline and baser motives become more ascendant in the world’s parliaments. Civilisational decline is not a pleasant experience.

LJ O’Donoghue, Richmond, Vic

The budget will most likely do nothing to correct the current economic mess.

It will, as David Pearl predicts (“Honesty the only policy for fixing dire economic outlook”, 24/3), make inflation and the debt burden only worse by increasing spending on renewables and subsidies such as the energy bill rebate. Gough Whitlam made us all poorer but Anthony Albanese and Jim Chalmers may outdo Whitlam. I will be keenly tuned in to Peter Dutton’s budget reply.

Alexander Haege, Tamarama, NSW