In October last year, Josh Frydenberg said “calls from Labor for a GFC-type stimulus are just ridiculous.”
“There is a spending story that is underway across the economy but it’s very targeted and it’s in the areas that need it most. And it’s not a scattergun approach where you write cheques willy-nilly to the last person who asked you.”
Josh said what was needed was long-term structural reform to boost competition, cut red tape and reform workplace relations.
That’s the sort of stuff Liberal treasurers always say – it’s the IPA mantra.
Five months later, with the uber-confident grin fading, Josh was sticking to the “Labor bad” line.
“We won’t repeat the mistakes of the past with cash splashes,” Frydenberg told Sky News – a week before announcing a $750 payment to welfare recipients.
It is ironic that the government is being praised for leadership when they have actually realised they are entirely out of their depth and handed over the reins to medical and financial experts rather than the marketing crew.
The maladministration of funds through grants systems and the inability to disperse relief funds in a timely manner are the consequences of purging the public service of those with the experience and know-how to administer programs.
How many times must it be shown that the Minister does not know best?
If I believed in some guiding supernatural force, I would suggest they are trying to tell us something. Personally, I prefer the scientists who are most definitely trying to tell us something.
Liberal governments have enjoyed the good times that have led to them being full of political animals and fundraisers. Winning elections by whatever means has been the goal.
In the George Winterton Lecture in 2012, Malcolm Turnbull said:
“How often do we hear Australian politicians discuss these challenges in a genuinely open, honest, spin-free and non-adversarial way? Where the intention is to clearly explain the problem, accept responsibility for past misteps if appropriate (rather than apportion as much blame as possible to the other side), allow a non-ideological discussion of possible remedies, and see if there is any common ground for bipartisan work?
Seldom, and even more rarely if a camera is rolling.”
Far from claiming credit, it has taken a global pandemic to expose the shallowness of our supposed leaders. All the things they railed against, they are now being forced to concede are necessary – renewable energy, emissions reduction, water management, fiscal stimulus, increased hospital funding, boost to welfare payments, a deficit budget and increased debt, increased preparedness to tackle bushfires, money to keep people employed (though how successful those measures will be is questionable).
Free trade agreements aren’t much use when there is no international trade.
Perhaps they will finally realise that there are better people to advise them than the Murdoch press and conservative “think tanks”.
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The idiots are in charge and are stuffing up everything.
At least potato head will be out of action hopefully for sometime.
The pathological Liar has never been wrong in his life,just ask him.The form guide for this government strongly suggests that whatever they say never turns out that way.They lied their way into a corner and it’s very satisfying to see them eat crow,Morrison will be hating it.He’s already reverted to form with more repetitive sloganeering about how excellent he is, which is as empty as the man himself.
Full of shit, as always,nothing will change for the better until the fool is punted into touch,permanently.
The things you hear :
I hear that Mr Dutton is pleading not to be sent to Christmas Island for fourteen days quarantine !
Among other things he doesn’t want to face the Sri Lankan family that he originally ordered be detained in February 2018 and who have been on Christmas Island detention since early 2019.
I hear that Bridget McKenzie is due to appear before the Senate Enquiry into sports rorts : as soon as they give her a date for her appearance it may just coincide with her need to go into fourteen days home isolation
What this govt must do immediately is stop all flights from the USA.
But they won’t, of course. They’d prefer to put more Australians at risk than offend the Mango Mussolini.
“Josh said what was needed was long-term structural reform to boost competition, cut red tape and reform workplace relations.”
NO Joshie, what is required is a Federal Treasurer with the technological knowledge of a Ken Henry and the political nous of a Kevin Rudd to push government money into the bottom of the economic pyramid to flow as usual up the economic structure, rather than have it put into the top and create no economic activity.
Better still, perhaps now is the ideal time for the Liarbral Nazianal$ to resign as a government and call a fresh election to allow a skilled team of Labor or National Unity Coalition of MPs to set the correct strategy and conduct the COVID-19 economic recovery programme.
Failed Hungarian professional tennis players may be part of Smirkie Sacked from Marketing inner sanctum of happy clappers, but they are definitely on the outside of those economists who know how to manage the national economy during this COVID-19 crisis.
The Chinese have suggested that the Coronavirus originated outside China and may have actually been brought to China by US military people.
In November, 2019, 300 US military personnel attended the International Military Games in Wuhan.
The first sign of the virus appeared in Wuhan two weeks after they left.
Conspiracy theory, anyone?
I always blame Paul Keating for the way the NLP have turned out. Like many of the lost, weak and feeble and the bullied they find salvation or guidance somewhere else like the church or a slick Evangelist salesmen like some of the yanks.They bought into the extreme right Neo Liberalism
doctrine.Just like a fanatic working for ISIS.They buy into it hook line and sinker.From privatisation to user pays to paying less tax..etc etc In 1996 John Howard drew a line in the sand. He borrowed the said economic rationalism extremism hard-line approach to Capitalism from the USA.For he was never going to take another Paul Keating style barb again.
And they became a ruthless hardline group you now see vaguely reminiscence of in the odd ball team today.Though in the glory years they had their deranged hit-man Abbott causing spot fires everywhere. Where up was down and down was up.When you borrow an ideology off the shelf and when different captains come and go and with their own interpretations the wheels start to fall off. As there was be nothing in the book on plagues or viruses or just being kind or real. Politics through the lens of obfuscation is a hard habit to break.
This whole coronavirus thing is what we used to call a Polite Fiction, we are really referring to the economic Recession we have been delivered into.
Jack, I too have heard that, though I don’t believe a conspiracy theory … I believe there might be some truth to it.
For all our good it would be sensible to close down stock markets for a couple of weeks.
The irrational exuberance of those playing the markets as demonstrated over recent weeks is in nobody’s interests beyond those playing the algorithms.
Michael.
I have a very jaundiced view of the USA, heightened by the documentaries I’ve seen about the h-bomb tests in the Marshall Islands where they appear deliberately to have placed their own troops downwind of the tests presumably ‘to see what happened to people caught in fallout.’
Plus they frequently sacrificed their own in war circumstances where they could blame the enemy. Not that they are unique in their perfidy, but no other country has produced so much self-adulation with so little justification.
And as far as the Military games are concerned, some finer minds than mine have said there is ‘no such thing as coincidence.’
When my kids accuse me of being too cynical, I just say cynics never get unpleasant surprises.
Jack, and don’t forget that the powers to be wanted the US to blow up one of their own cruise liners so they could blame it on Castro. JFK said NO.
From the NZ Herald 17 May 2014:
It was, at the time, the biggest bang humans had ever made. The US nuclear test at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands on March 1, 1954, was 1000 times larger than the bombs that obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
That’s not in the same league as the fury nature unleashed on Krakatoa or beneath what is now Lake Taupo, but the 15-megaton blast – codenamed Castle Bravo – has been exceeded artificially only once, by the Soviets’ 50-plus megaton Tsar Bomba in 1961.
What happened next was one of the great nightmares of the nuclear age. Fallout from Castle Bravo drifted over the inhabited atolls of Rongelap, Rongerik and Utirik.
On Rongelap, children played in highly radioactive incinerated coral, thinking it was storybook snow.
An hour after the explosion, the per-hour radiation level on the islands was 130 roentgen (R); 50 hours on, it was 175R. Normal background exposure is about 20R in a lifetime.
More than 60 years on, the fallout, literal and moral, from the test has not been cleaned up.
Two generations of birth defects and cancers, notably thyroid cancers and leukaemia, have ravaged the atolls’ population, and women have given birth to babies that looked like bunches of grapes or jellyfish.
The US Government has never denied the islands were contaminated. But eight months after Bravo, the word “accidental” began to appear in all official documents. It has never been removed.
Now, an independent American documentary film, Nuclear Savage, which will screen in Auckland next week and Wellington next month, gives for the first time solid documentary evidence of deliberation.
Adam Horowitz, whose 1990 film Home on the Range reported on the islanders’ plight, is scathing about his Government’s actions and subsequent inaction.
Rosemary J36
The idea that the Coronavirus was produced in a laboratory in the USA is gathering momentum. About 15 years ago some US soldiers were hit by anthrax, which the authorities were experimenting with near their base.
The world was told that Smallpox has been eliminated from the entire world. But the US has kept a couple of phials of it.
Why?
Smallpox has proven useful to the USA for a couple of hundred years.
And the outbreak of Coronavirus has been greatest in countries that ‘upset’ the USA. China, Iran, and believe it or not, Italy. Why Italy? Because it signed up to the Silk Road…to the distress and positive rage of the U.S. of A.
Keep any eye on Venezuela.
Biological weaponry is part and parcel of US history and current strategic activities.
Friedeggburger thinking: If I hold my breath then I won’t get the virus without realising (he’s not smart don’t forget) that eventually he’ll pass out from not…oh wait…the LNP are the human equivalent of anaerobic bacteria. So he’s safe, darn it!
Perhaps the virus will stay away from people like Trump and the happy clapper, like sharks not attacking lawyers out of professional courtesy.
For my part, I do not believe conspiracy theories in general, but the fact that the military and financial controllers of the governments of the USofA have occasionally failed to hide their perfidies, despite the extreme measures which they employ to do so, indicates the high probability that there is much depravity being undertaken as a matter of course of which we mere commoners will never be informed.
“Be their deeds shall ye know them.”
It would not be Dutton but his family that would be sent.