The budget next month looks to be a nightmare of tax and spending increases, a growing debt masked by about 17 pages of ‘it’s not our fault’ and ‘it would have been much worse if the other guys were still in charge’.
It’s likely that the actual deficit will be less than they are forecasting. This has nothing to do with Labor and everything to do with the price of commodities. Like coal, gas and iron ore.
Labor will claim credit for the reduced deficit but if they were worth their salt they’d deliver a surplus in the face of such windfall profits.
Like dutiful apparatchiks of the state, much of the legacy media will just regurgitate Labor’s lines and a naive populace will accept the explanations.
Failure will never be Labor’s fault.
The rental and housing crisis will have nothing to do with the record immigration numbers introduced by Labor. The power prices and blackouts will have nothing to do with Labor’s embrace of renewables and hatred of fossil fuels.
The higher taxes will have nothing to do with their unwillingness to plug the budget black holes of the NDIS, Welfare and Health.
None of it is Labor’s fault although they've been in charge for nigh on a year.
And really, what have we got to show for it?
On the plus side, The Chinese are talking to us again, TikTok is not on govt phones, although it's still used by govt MPs and our bureaucrats are so enlightened many can’t yet define what a woman is.
To make things worse, the Prime Minister, who appears to love travelling in government jets more than electric cars, refused an invitation to join a NATO summit even though the world is on the brink of war.
That’s not what I call taking our national security seriously.
So if we don’t have a government that wants to take our issues seriously, what do we have?
We are governed by mid-level managers who think we are either too stupid to see through their smoke and mirror parlour game or it might be that they simply don’t care if we do.
Cory Bernardi is the author of seven books and has been a member of the Australian rowing team, a publican, an investment portfolio manager and spent nearly 14 years as an Australian Senator.
