#auspol #nswpol #springst @thepolicyok Shorten still throwing our future away. Piers Akerman – Friday, December 05, 2014 Whatever Opposition Leader Bill Shorten may say about Prime Minister Tony Abbott, Labor policies were responsible for the nation’s perilous finances, and he has no solutions. He leads a party which could meaningfully negotiate with the government and negate the debilitating effect on public confidence of the truly stupid minority party senators, but he prefers to put at risk the nation’s reputation for good governance for petty political gain. The disorderly former PUP senator Jacqui Lambie and her cross-bench colleagues owe their disruptive balance of power to Labor’s determination to be wreckers, not builders. Without Labor, they would be toast. Australians have been twice warned in the space of a fortnight that they face a deteriorating standard of living. Outgoing Treasury secretary Martin Parkinson warned last week that unless tough decisions were taken over the next few years, the future is bleak. ‘It’s not feasible to materially reduce spending growth without looking at the largest spending categories … this is health, welfare and higher education,” he said. They are the three policy areas where the senate has refused to embrace change, areas which Labor has in the past sought to reform but is now rejecting necessary reorganisation. Parkinson warned: ‘We know what failure looks like. Declining growth in living standards, perhaps even falling living standards, lower wages, few opportunities for our young and, in all likelihood, declining public services and rising personal tax burdens. ‘The implications for fiscal sustainability of failing to take action seem to have been lost in the public debate, as if this does not matter to Australia’s future prosperity,” he said. Shorten and his team are just sitting on their hands. Yet he was a minister in the successive Labor governments, which constantly failed to produce promised surpluses and presented nothing but deficits, culminating in the $48.5 billion deficit for 2013-14 - $30 billion larger than Labor forecast last year. Parkinson’s analysis made three specific points. In addition to emphasising the need to examine the three big-spending policy areas, he said it was better to cut spending than increase taxation, and he stressed the need to act now or face another ten years of budget deficits. ‘This should be understood for what it is,” Parkinson said. ‘A serious warning to us as a nation that unless we tackle structural reform, including fixing our fundamental budget problem, we will not be able to guarantee rising income and living standards for Australians.” In the next fortnight, Treasurer Joe Hockey will deliver the Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook (MYEFO), setting the direction until next May’s federal Budget. This opportunity to regain control of the debate must not be squandered. With the ABC and Fairfax promoting the minority parties and generally supporting Labor’s negative approach to any of the Coalition’s budgetary measures, about 90 per cent of the media are working with the opposition to consign Australians to reduced standards of living in the next decade. Labor has a role to play in opposition but under Shorten it has vacated its authoritative position and preferred to let the nation think crazy cross-benchers are running the country. It is actively promoting the chaos. With grotesque hypocrisy, it is actually blocking $5.7 billion of cuts it advocated when it was in office, including research and development tax changes and tax cuts linked to the now extinct job-destroying carbon tax. Labor has a record of cutting university research funds and promoted an overall reduction in spending on the tertiary sector. Now it is looking the other way, or actively promoting demented radicals from the noisy but essentially irrelevant Social Alliance organisation and other disruptive fanatics. The GP co-payment should not be a conversation killer. The Hawke Labor government backed the initiative more than 20 years ago, New Zealanders have lived with a co-payment without any fuss, and such a market mechanism is universally regarded as a common sense solution to reducing unnecessary demands on an already overstretched public health system. But Labor, under Shorten, has sacrificed rational and coherent long-term policy objectives that would benefit the nation for short-term, headline-catching negativity. In his end-of-year remarks to parliament yesterday, Prime Minister Tony Abbott remarked that the fundamental tasks were?national security and economic security. He said that at least on one of those tasks the government received a great deal of co-operation from the opposition. With his usual charitableness he omitted the fact that Labor had slashed defence spending when in office and run down our national security capability. Now that parliament has risen for the year, Labor must ask itself if it wants to continue building the reputations of minority party non-entities and cement itself as the party of negativity and destruction, or to take part in our democracy constructively.As long as he stays wedded to adolescent rabble-rousing rather than making contributions to constructive and productive policy, he will cement his identity as a roadblock on the path to a positive, prosperous future. (blogs.news.au/dailytelegraph/piersakerman/index.php/dailytelegraph/comments/shorten_still_throwing_our_future_away/)
Posted on: Sat, 06 Dec 2014 04:12:33 +0000
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015