The longer the election campaign goes, the more confusing Joe Hockey becomes.
Last week he was angrily claiming inflation wasn’t under control, a view at odds with, well, the rest of the universe. It would place upward pressure on interest rates, he insisted. Yesterday he responded to the RBA decision to leave rates on hold by claiming we’d “dodged a bullet.” “Quite clearly,” Hockey said, “evidence emerging on retail sales and building construction indicates the last interest rate increase is still hurting Australian families. They are feeling the heat because the government just doesn’t understand what it is doing.”
Just forget for a moment those two statements don’t make any sense when run together anyway.
If inflation remains out of control, as Hockey insists that it does, then why didn’t the RBA lift rates yesterday? Shouldn’t he have been reluctantly urging the RBA to lift rates to deal with inflation?
The only economic policy Hockey has to offer is the straw man of Labor debt driving up interest rates. The economic facts have relentlessly refused to cooperate – just like they refused to cooperate in the aftermath of the GFC, when the Coalition insisted the Government’s stimulus packages wouldn’t work.
You can only assume that is why Hockey has been almost entirely absent from the Liberals’ national campaign so far, with Andrew Robb much more visible. It has been Robb who has counter-punched every time Labor has tried to attack the Liberals’ costings, not Hockey. It has been Robb who has been all over the media attacking Labor. Hockey has been the invisible man of the campaign, confined to regional Queensland campaigning, although he got tangled up in Cairns yesterday over conflict of interest claims.
Imagine Peter Costello vanishing from sight for long stretches of election campaigns during the Howard years.
Yesterday Tony Abbott confirmed he would retain his existing economic team if he won Government. That means at this rate we’ll wake up on 22 August and Hockey will be in charge of the Australian economy.
The only reason Hockey has the job is because, after the debacle of Julie Bishop as Shadow Treasurer, Malcolm Turnbull foolishly promoted him over Robb. When Abbott knocked off Turnbull, he left Hockey in place out of fear of causing ructions amongst Liberal moderates.
We may all end up paying for Turnbull’s error of judgement back then.
….and you Bernard keep criticising others in the media for being unbalanced and biased??????
A great piece except one thing. Could some realistic figures be produced that prove (big word in this election campaign) the Government Stimulus Package was the difference between Australia and the other “western economies” (i.e. Europe, US)? Did it definitively:
Save unemployment from going to 9% (or did China and India)?
Improve the infrastructure of our country for the future?
Be value for money?
Keep our credit rating secure (or did China and India).
Because I think the Stimulus Package’s “saviour status” is very overblown.
@Redneck, oops, Redcrikey:
Nobel Prize winning economist Professor Joseph Stiglitz speaks with Kerry O’Brien, ABC 7.30 Report.
Transcript
KERRY O’BRIEN: I’m not sure how much you know about Australia’s stimulus packages in response to the crisis, but to the extent that you do, how did the quality of Australia’s stimulus compare with that in the US and elsewhere, in terms of its effectiveness?
JOSEPH STIGLITZ: I did actually study quite a bit the Australian package, and my impression was that it was the best – one of the best-designed of all the advanced industrial countries. When the crisis struck, you have to understand no-one was sure how deep, how long it would be. There was that moment of panic. Rightfully so, because the whole financial system was on the verge of collapse. In that context, what you need to act is decisively. If you don’t act decisively, you could get the collapse. It’s a one-sided risk.
KERRY O’BRIEN: There’s been a lot of criticism of waste in the way some of Australia’s stimulus money was spent. Is it inevitable if you’re going to spend a great deal of government money quickly that there will be some waste and can you ever justify wasting taxpayers’ money?
JOSEPH STIGLITZ: If you hadn’t spent the money, there would have been waste. The waste would have been the fact that the economy would have been weak, there would have been a gap between what the economy could have produced and what it actually produced – that’s waste. You would have had high unemployment, you would have had capital assets not fully utilised – that’s waste. So your choice was one form of waste verses another form of waste. And so it’s a judgment of what is the way to minimise the waste. No perfection here. And what your government did was exactly right. So, Australia had the shortest and shallowest of the downturns of the advanced industrial countries. And, ah, your recovery actually preceded the – in some sense, China. So there was a sense in which you can’t just say Australia recovered because of China. Your preventive action, you might say pre-emptive action, prevented the downturn while things got turned around in Asia, and they still have not gotten turned around in Europe and America.
It is so amazing that the ALP saves the economy from collapse, spends an unprecedented amount of money on schools, health, insulation, infrastructure, gets parental leave through parliament. As usual when there is lots of money floating around BUSINESS rorts multiply and many business people try unsuccessfully to suppress their criminal tendencies. As a result boofheads like Hockey and Abbot are now looked upon as an alternative government. Go figure.
@KEANE
And then again we may wake up on 22 August and find that Swan/Gillard/AWU are in charge of the Oz economy.
That shouldn’t frighten us should it? Three more year to convert Australia into Argentina. How exciting !!!