Margaret Ludowyk writes: Guy Rundle is sounding like just another grumpy old white man (“Chalmers’ plan isn’t radical. Labor needs an alternative to the rule of capital”). He’s either got a vivid imagination or he’s just looking for attention with his exaggerated critique of Treasurer Jim Chalmers’ essay.
Chalmers’ piece didn’t read like a plan to me, just a high-level summary of how we got to the economic mess we’re now in and a few general ideas about how we need to come up with novel solutions. I’m not sure how Rundle read so much between the lines.
Erik Kulakauskas writes: Chalmers’ essay in and of itself is a step in the right direction, and Rundle sets it right and addresses some of the important detail. I would add the following, which is only a brief grab at what would help us all.
Public/private partnerships are not the answer. In practice, the taxpayer takes all the risk and the private sector takes all the profit. I fail to see how this benefits the rest of us which surely is the intention of ”values-based capitalism”. Capitalism, and thereby profit-seeking, has no place in key social areas such as education, health, aged care, the NDIS and public transport. The critical end-user suffers badly from substandard service delivery to satisfy the profit motive in these sensitive service areas. I have the sense these service areas do not require more money thrown at them — importantly they need to be restructured.
Even if they do require significant additional funding there are plenty of funds for the taking for a government with vision and courage. The bucket includes, for example, the stage three tax cuts, taxing the mining and energy companies and the wealthy appropriately and fairly, desisting the naive and silly expenditure on fanciful defence projects, and targeting the rent-seekers and the leaners. Back of the envelope — about $100 billion a year.
We are not short of money, but we are well short of good and effective governance and management.
Peter Best writes: Guy Rundle writes well and was for some time the main reason for my subscribing to Crikey, but I’m getting tired of him always knowing more than anyone else, always being better at anything than the people whose job it is. His certainty is becoming off-putting. He should read some of his long-ago pieces, see what he’s lost, and see if he can find it again.
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Erik K is a genius. Says it all.
Agree 100%!! Especially the bit about public/private partnerships NOT being the answer. ALL essential services, including utilities, should be in government hands…full stop.
A lot of the time, I think Rundle is high on his own farts. For this essay, he’s pretty cogent, critiquing Jim Chalmers’ essay and suggesting some rather more significant steps a braver Labor could take. Chalmers’ essay points in the right direction, but it lacks gumption. It’s not enough if we want a society where more of us are more equal, we save national money for our collective future, and we treat corporate overlords and their organisations with the suspicion they deserve by taxing them properly on money earned in Australia. We need to take the kinds of leaps (and more, to be honest) that Rundle proposes this time.
For goodness sake, the Chalmers “essay” was a try-on. It was an indulgence to even publish it. Albanese Labor stands for Donor Based Capitalism, not Values Based Capitalism. What the donors want is massive levels of immigration, unbridled real estate speculation, low-taxed resource extraction, and uncapped international students. And that’s just what they have.
As ever, it’s not even the policies, that are ultimately so annoying. It’s the political lies, gaslighting, grandstanding, and dishonesty. I don’t have a problem, with Chalmers pleasuring himself. I just wish, he wouldn’t inflict it, upon disenfranchised voters.
That is so damn straight
Best to have LNP and ON RWNJ types in govt. implementing closed borders and immigration restrictions as a socioeconomic policy, then crash budgets a la ‘Trussonomics’ and remove any social mobility.
There will be increasing mobility when the ‘baby boomer bomb’ starts popping its clogs big time in a few years, backgrounded by working age decline, starting pre Covid; great replacement?
“Closed borders” LOL.
LNP over the last twenty-odd years have been responsible for some of the highest levels of immigration in Australia’s history. Exceeded only when New Labor took the helm.
Their supply-side economic beliefs demand it.
Not talking of past twenty years but ’22 with car crash of Tory Trussonomics (or more correctly ‘Kochonomics’) continuing on from BRexit, shutting UK off from its biggest trade partner the EU; immigration got the vote over the line.
Again, like the UK, quiet on formal and modest permanent immigration, but howls of continual outrage about refugees, NOM net overseas migration ‘noise’ e.g. international students, population growth and then correlate to any negative issue; ignoring the impact of Brexit immigration restrictions on the economy and occupations or sectors with demographic decline, smart…..
I have to agree with most of what Guy has said in his critique of Chalmers self-serving and self-indulgent, foppy essay. I see it as encouraging more rent seeking from business in the fields of aged care chiefly who will then go on the offensive and, like a developer that has got his way with council after agreeing to some lousy concessions like building a gate post or a park bench as part of the development, will then blackmail the government or the relevant authority or both and ask for more houses on the land slated for development. More beds for the nursing facility. Government subsidies for Registered Nurses and half decent food. All because this Labor government would rather bank the money or buy expensive submarines with it than take over funding and administering the service.
Rundle’s recent railings against the Voice have really made him start to seem like one of these grumpy old men upset that their world is changing/evolving.