The $250bn (Thats B for BILLION 250 thousand MILLION) cost of Kevin Rudd: a tale of waste and spending
Henry Ergas and Judith Sloan on Kevin Rudd’s record:
...in the 935 days between becoming prime minister on December 3, 2007, and Julia Gillard’s coup of June 24, 2010, Rudd left Australians with at least $153 billion in unfunded fiscal burdens while wasting $100bn of the community’s resources....
By far the most visible component of the costs was ... the commonwealth’s balance sheet shifting from $44.8bn in net assets when Rudd took office to $161.6bn in net debt this year.
Clearly, part of that $206bn deterioration in Australia’s fiscal position reflected the global financial crisis… [but] the response was anything but careful and deliberate.
Instead, Rudd unleashed a torrent of public spending that ... locked in outlays that were not reversed even when the economy returned to trend growth ... In short, out of accumulated budget deficits of $172.3bn attributable to Rudd, between $98bn and $157bn reflected profligacy rather than adverse circumstances…
[It] is beyond dispute that there was far-reaching waste in programs such as school halls and pink batts… Nor is there much argument that the dismantling of Howard’s Pacific Solution… has left a trail of high costs… And the fiasco associated with the carbon tax… To those errors, Rudd added the mistake of thundering into areas that traditionally have been the preserve of the states. Childcare is a striking case in point…
On a plausible estimate, the overall waste thus caused amounts to between $74bn and $88bn. But even that number ... excludes ... Rudd’s brainchild, the National Broadband Network… [Losses] the NBN is likely to incur to 2027 have climbed to more than $30bn…
But Rudd ...also slashed the economy’s capacity to bear the burdens ... [by] introducing the Fair Work Act… [and] forcing 1.25 per cent of the labour force into needless unemployment ...
At least $120bn in needlessly accumulated debt; about $100bn in waste from poor quality spending and taxing; $30bn in losses from the NBN alone; and an industrial relations system that reduces national income by at least $6bn a year and creates an adversarial climate in the workplace: all that makes Rudd the costliest prime minister in Australian history.
If we got to 2016-17 under a re-elected Rudd government, it will have been more than quarter of a century since the last Labor budget surplus, way back in 1989-90.
Since then we would have had budget deficits every year of the way that Labor was in government. With those deficits adding up to the staggering, damning, sum of $350 billion....
Iterrupted by around $100bn of budget surpluses from the Coalition Howard-Costello period....
The core truth of six years of Rudd-Gillard governments, and which would remain the core truth if we ended up with nine years of Rudd-Gillard-Rudd governments, is that Labor can’t help its high-spending, high-taxing self.
By 2016-17, spending would have increased by a massive 63 per cent—or nearly 6 per cent a year every year since the Coalition lost office. Total revenues would have leapt by more than 50 per cent.
Most tellingly, the personal tax take would have increased by nearly 75 per cent since the Costello years… Even the company tax take, which Swan used to bleat about plunging, would be up by nearly a third, to $80 billion. by 2016-17 over the last Costello budget.
