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Terry McCrann lays out the unvarnished, unalloyed facts of the matter.

“..On the (Alan) Jones & Co program on Sky News on Tuesday night former Labor leader-turned-laceratingly penetrating political and social commentator Mark Latham said the national Budget was in as bad a shape now as it had been back in 2013.

I had to disagree with him.

It’s actually in worse shape, far worse shape. And if the Budget is in bad shape, believe me, the country is as well.

There are four broad reasons.

First, back in 2013 we actually had a (semi) believable Opposition promising to take the tough decisions to try to fix it. No longer; now we have a “unity ticket” to do absolutely nothing about it.

And that’s at best; for now we have an Opposition faced with a Government promising debt and deficits as far as the fiscal eye can see, promising to actually make them worse.

Take your pick on July 2: Tweedledee fiscally dumb or Tweedledum fiscally dumber.

Secondly, back in 2013 we might have had a reasonable basis for expecting — more realistically, hoping — that the China money would keep rolling in.

Yes, the resources boom was in the process of peaking, but one could make a believable case for the “China story” to keep unfolding positively, if at a somewhat lower level than the fabulous (for us) peak years.

Again, no longer; that prospect is now — a very stretched — at best. A more sober assessment of China’s future would have to run the spectrum from “seriously soft” to straight-out disastrous..”

Read on…..