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Tag Archives: Waste

The Labor Party Should Be Charged For The Cost of Printing Abbott’s First 100 Days Booklet!

Labor wastes money! We know this. Tony Abbott, Joe Hockey and company have been banging on about Labor wasting money for years.

And today, Joe Hockey will tell us that the budget has blown out from the $30 billion estimated during the election campaign to a whopping $50 billion. That’s, of course, all down to Labor. Well may not, the $8 billion that the Coalition gave to the Reserve Bank. I suspect that won’t come up in the Press Conference.

“It’s blown out by a further $20 billion!” announces Hockey

So the obvious question is: “But isn’t more than half that, the money you gave to the Reserve Bank and the billions of dollars of tax revenue which you’ve decided not to go ahead with?”

Unfortunately, I doubt that one will be asked. I doubt that the press will even ask – if saving money is such a priority – why did Tony Abbott waste money producing a booklet of his first 100 days? If they do, Hockey will immediately say that Kevin Rudd did that too.

You see, that’s politics: Everything Labor did was bad, unless we’re doing it too, in which case it’s perfectly ok, because they did it!

But rather surprisingly, I’m not at all concerned about the recent booklet. I want to re-visit a more important booklet that the Liberals created. The Little Book of Big Labor Waste, where they list 60 areas where Labor had wasted money.

A few months ago, I actually read this booklet and wrote about it in a blog. And it seems to me that Liberals have either forgotten all about it, or are saving the big announcements for their committee of audit. Either way, I don’t think it’s good enough.

For example, where’s the announcement that they’ve stopped this outrageous waste of money! Public servants getting milk! 350 litres to 900 bureaucrats. That’s more than a third of a litre each! If they could just stop this altogether, then we’d the Budget would be a mere $49,999,999,890 (or should that be $49,999,999,999,890. Like Barnaby Joyce, I sometimes get my billions and millions mixed up).

Image

There were a few other concerns, like Labor advertising the “schoolkids bonus” because people weren’t aware that they were entitled to it. A complete waste of money, because the Liberals are scrapping it, so there’s absolutely no need for people to have known about it!

In fairness though, there are some areas where the Liberals have delivered. For example, there were many complaints about money being wasted on research. And as for this one:

ABC

Well, I’m sure that they won’t waste any money on equity and fairness when appointing anyone to anything. As for the ABC, they can just appoint Andrew Bolt to the board. That should ensure that there’s no bias against the Liberals. Because, after all, isn’t that what bias means? You write something against the Liberals. Everything else is just the truth!

We were wrong on Joe Hockey and Debt Ceiling. Correction Follows!

A few days ago, I posted a blog suggesting that Joe Hockey was planning to lift the debt ceiling by 33% to $400 billion.

Hockey To Lift Debt Ceiling by 33%, and the Hypocrisy Level to an All-time High

I was wrong.

When you make a mistake I think the best thing to do is admit it and apologise.

It’s just been announced that Hockey is seeking to lift the debt ceiling by 66% to $500 billion. So obviously, he’s concerned that Labor will continue to waste money in Opposition. After all, the Liberals had a pretty good go at doing that.

Treasurer Joe Hockey says the Federal Government is increasing the Commonwealth debt limit by $200 billion to provide “stability”.

Mr Hockey announced the increase after Federal Cabinet met today to consider the debt limit issue and the details of the Government’s commission of audit.

“I announce today that the Coalition Government will have to increase the debt limit for Commonwealth Government securities to $500 billion,” he said.

“We are increasing it to that level because I’ve been advised that on December 12, the current debt limit of $300 billion will be hit.”

Joe Hockey said the last Treasury assessment, provided in the pre-election fiscal outlook, predicted debt would peak at $370 billion.

But he said recent trends showed it would instead exceed $400 billion.

The ABC, 22nd October, 2013.

Of course, this is to provide “stability”, whereas Labor raising the debt limit to $300 billion was a budget emergency. $40-60 billion of it is just “a buffer” according to Joe. Why we need a buffer when the Liberals are back in charge is yet to be explained. I mean, there was no black hole in the costings and every promise was accounted for, so why do we need to keep on borrowing money at an even faster rate the Labor Government.

But anyway, sorry everyone for misleading you the other day.

 

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$110,000 done, $69 billion to go

Like what we do at The AIMN?

You’ll like it even more knowing that your donation will help us to keep up the good fight.

Chuck in a few bucks and see just how far it goes!

Your contribution to help with the running costs of this site will be gratefully accepted.

You can donate through PayPal or credit card via the button below, or donate via bank transfer: BSB: 062500; A/c no: 10495969

Donate Button