BILL Shorten is trashing our tomorrow for cheap votes today. And the shame is much of the public seem to be cheering him on.
Wake up! Thousand of Australians may pay for the Opposition Leader’s reckless politicking with their jobs, and millions could get poorer.
“We are not buying this argument that there’s some Budget emergency,” Shorten soothed voters last week.
“There is no Budget crisis,” echoed his Shadow Treasurer, Chris Bowen.
No, there’s no need to accept the cuts of the wicked Abbott Government. It’s all a Liberal hoax.
“The truth is they wanted to confect or manufacture a Budget crisis because these are the sorts of cuts they actually want to bring in,” sneers Labor’s finance spokesman, Tony Burke.
What makes this worse is that Shorten is kicking Abbott for trying to fix the disaster created by Labor.
Left a surplus, and gifted our greatest mining boom, the Rudd and Gillard governments still piled
up $190 billion of deficits in just five years.
They plunged into an orgy of spending so carelessly, it’s criminal.
The $44 billion national broadband white elephant was mapped out on the back of a beer coaster by prime minister Kevin Rudd and his communications minister.
The $3 billion free insulation disaster was scribbled out by Rudd’s “inner circle” on a serviette, one of the scheme’s advisers claimed last week at the royal commission.
And Labor’s big spending is still locked in, so we face another decade of deficits unless something is done. Already we’re paying $12 billion a year in interest on Labor’s debt.
Should China suddenly slow over the next 10 years, or another global financial crisis come, we’ll be ruined. We’ll have not a dollar in the kitty to defend ourselves.
It is astonishing that one of Australia’s two main political parties is so dead to its duty to protect this nation from such harm.
Sure, Labor can quibble about the term “emergency”. We won’t be a Greece by Christmas. But it shouldn’t dare pretend change isn’t critical — and must start now.
Hear it from Martin Parkinson, the Treasury secretary Labor appointed, who two months ago warned we had to make “hard decisions” to cut government spending.
The nation’s debt was mounting so high that “if we do not start making these changes and simply keep drifting along, we will be increasingly vulnerable to the next global crisis”.
Then “our children may really end up doing it tough”.
The Reserve Bank Governor Glenn Stevens praised Parkinson’s “important” warning and added: “Put simply, there are things we want to do as a society, and have voted for, that are not fully funded by taxes over the medium-term.”
But what do we hear from Shorten? No to cuts. No to tax rises.
Last year, Labor did at least promise $5 billion in cuts to health and education. But now, with Abbott in charge, it blocks those same cuts in the Senate.
When Abbott last week decided to lift the pension age to 70 by 2035, Shorten falsely screamed “broken promise” and refused to support it.
When Abbott floated adding a $6 fee to what are free visits to the doctor, Shorten cried “poorer people will be unfairly hit”.
Now that Abbott wants to keep down the projected $12 billion-a-year cost of Labor’s national disability scheme, Shorten shouts it’s “a complete betrayal”.
Now, Abbott plans a “deficit levy” on richer Australians, Shorten says he’ll fight this “deceit tax”.
And when the Government’s commission of audit last week recommended $70 billion in cuts, Shorten refused to support a single one — other than a cut to Abbott’s pet parental leave scheme.
Instead, he engaged in the crudest class war talk to rouse the rabble, falsely claiming the commission’s report was “written by big business, for big business” to ensure “families get less while millionaires get more”.
If Shorten were powerless, this wouldn’t much matter but he has this country by the throat.
Labor and the Greens can together block any law in the Senate, and when the new Senate takes over in July, they’ll still need only the support of Clive Palmer’s senators or three of the four other crossbenchers to keep stopping Abbott.
What a nightmare. There’s Labor and the Greens insisting there’s no problem, and Palmer all over the shop. The Government, meanwhile, has poll figures that are soft, a backbench that is skittish, and every interest group on its back.
We’re sinking and, on present evidence, can’t find the will to save ourselves. And there’s Captain Shorten telling us to just order another round of drinks on the house.
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/opinion/wake-up-labor-were-sinking-as-budget-needs-fixing/story-fni...
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