Austerity doesn’t work. The lesson from Greece is clear.

If the Australian Government, the Opposition, the MSM and the common people cannot learn from events now playing out across Europe and the USA, namely that money itself is worthless, that it is only a means to an end, then our lives and those of our children will not improve.

We need to understand that our responsibilities are to ourselves, not to later generations. What we do here, today, to improve our way of life, will determine the foundations upon which the next generation will build a future for their lives, in their time. We will be judged by them on what we do, not on what we don’t do.

Today we take for granted things like television, motor cars, dishwashers, computers and the technologies that brought them into being. But these innovations were begun by earlier generations.

Our forefathers and mothers built the roads, the bridges, the ports, the hospitals, the transport infrastructure, the household necessities and whatever else was needed to get the country moving and to keep it moving.

They did that for themselves and they paid for it themselves. In doing so, they passed onto us a foundation upon which we could expand and develop further with new innovations, newer technologies. This we are doing for ourselves and which we will pay for, ourselves.

Each generation develops its own technologies and pays for its own way of living for its own benefit.

The technologies we have developed today serve us as we continue to build a better Australia. The next generation will do the same to better their lives. They will pay for it and give generations after them a new foundation to continue that process.

What this means economically, is that we need to continue that process, to provide our people with employment today, to raise our own standard of living today, create new infrastructure for ourselves today and in the process, lay a foundation that will ensure a prosperous future. In doing so, we enable the next generation to do the same.

That doesn’t happen when we engage in austerity measures that restrict the flow of money that put people out of work that inhibit educational opportunities, reduce health services and waste billions on regressive immigration policies.

2016 U.S. Presidential candidate, Bernie Sanders stated recently that The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates that it would cost $3.6 trillion to bring America’s infrastructure to a state of good repair. Spending $1 trillion would create about 13 million new jobs. The choice is clear. “Let’s rebuild America and create jobs here,” he said.

He’s right. It’s not rocket science. From the earliest days of federation the great task of building the infrastructure to get our nation on the move, began. And we did it by creating money.

Creating money without incurring debt and using that money to build infrastructure, to create jobs, to increase the money flow, to create and build wealth. Restricting the money flow by austerity such as the Abbott government is doing is counter-productive; it is foolish.

This is what the European Commission has been forced to acknowledge in its treatment of Greece. It wasn’t the Greek people who got their country into this mess. It was the German banks, the International Monetary Fund, the European Commission and the previous corrupt Greek government. It was “those that lent the money, those that fudged the figures and those who have moved their money into offshore accounts”.

You can read at you leisure, here, where the real blame lies for the current level of Greek debt.

Greek austerity measures have not worked. By contrast, in 2009, in the wake of the GFC the Obama administration in the U.S. embarked upon a program of quantitative easing (creating money), that has worked well enough to get people back to work and the economy moving again, albeit somewhat shakily, but with no sign of inflation.

Australia did this also in 2008 under the Rudd Labor government and avoided a recession; a point that the present government finds difficult to grasp.

IMF managing director, Christine Legard acknowledged in a frank admission recently, that austerity had failed in Greece and the number one priority was to get people back to work.

The IMF itself has now acknowledged this in its own research studies that found, “If the income share of the top 20 per cent increases by 1 percentage point, GDP growth is 0.08 percentage points lower in the following five years, suggesting that the benefits do not “trickle down” to the rest of us. By contrast, if the income share going to the poor (the bottom 20 per cent) increases by 1 percentage point, GDP growth is 0.38 percentage points higher in the following five years.”

There is a clear message here for the present Australian Government, but I doubt they will pay any attention to it. The Abbott Government has neither the skill nor the will to get Australians back to work. It serves a different master. It is no different from the European bankers who want to broaden inequality, or the American super rich who hate Obama with a passion.

The Greek referendum has forced the EU commission and the IMF to face their Rubicon. What they do now will decide the fate of Greece, the Euro and the European Union. What lessons the rest of us learn will determine the economic future for Australia and the world for this and the generation to follow.