How much more of this do we tolerate? Our present government is comprised of an incompetent bunch of fools, idiots and grouches. No matter where one looks, they all appear incapable of managing a chook raffle, let alone the 12th largest economy in the world.
Is it any wonder political expediency has now usurped any attempt at further budget savings measures?
As each week passes we are witnesses to more hilarity, more stupidity, less concern for the nation’s future, a leadership vacuum, each member seemingly looking out for his/her own survival. What a shambles.
With the MSM now turning against them, the most severe criticism, which first came from bloggers and social media, is now front page on our dailies. Yesterday, Laura Tingle of the Australian Financial Review wrote, “At issue is not just whether Tony Abbott loses his leadership, or whether the budget bottom line deteriorates even further, but signs that our political system really is in deep trouble – not as a polemic point, but in a very real sense.”
The AFR’s editorial yesterday is another case in point. “Prime Minister Tony Abbott literally has lost the plot on budget repair plan that the Coalition took to the people in 2013. The budget that was then portrayed as being in crisis now is in worse shape than forecast at the time of the election.
Mr Abbott’s promise to end his first term in government with the budget back on a clear path to surplus is now in tatters along with the unambitious target to build it up to 1 per cent of gross domestic product by the early 2020s.”
The Sydney Morning Herald is equally scathing.
How insulting is it that these pretenders were being heralded as the adults back in charge? How pathetic does Joe Hockey’s pre-election assertion that he would have the budget back in surplus in his first year and every year thereafter, sound now?
And perhaps the biggest insult to the Australian people we have heard in decades, that after telling us there was a budget emergency, a debt and deficit disaster and any number of similarly outrageous claims, suddenly, we are now told, that the budget is “manageable”.
Furthermore, Abbott tells us that a debt to GDP ratio of 50-60% is not bad. Really? Is that net or gross? Our current gross debt to GDP ratio is about 27%. The net figure is 14%. Which one is he referring to? Does he even know?
Mark Kenny wrote in the Canberra Times, “The best that can be said for the economic messaging from this government is that is it mercurial. The worst is that it has been a political train wreck. Abbott and Hockey are now trapped between their own exaggerated pre-election rhetoric, unmet promises, and what looks like gross political naïveté.”
Pre-election rhetoric and gross political naïveté summarise adequately the ‘before and after’ of this government’s train wreck. Whether they believed their own outrageous claims and projections before, then afterwards, refuse to realise how absurd they were, is hard to say.
What is clear to the MSM now, but which was obvious to a multitude of citizen journalists two years ago, is that the LNP are economically inept. They were trained during that privileged period when bucket loads of money came from the mining boom. They don’t know how to manage a downturn.
Even Ross Gittens (The Age), now acknowledges the need for a fiscal response. He makes the point that when interest rates and inflation are so low they inhibit investment in favour of savings, both in the business and the domestic sectors.
Political expediency in preference to honest, forthright explanations has been the hallmark of this government’s hollow narrative. Or, as some would say, in the absence of a narrative.
While we have been highly critical of them from the beginning, that criticism has since been vindicated several times over.
It is time to get this train wreck off the tracks.
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