Like the chameleon that changes its colours to match its surroundings, Labor has come up with a budget recovery and growth plan, a 10-year one, just like the Coalition. It’s so late in the campaign it looks like an afterthought, coincidentally promising to achieve a balanced budget whenever the Coalition promises one.
Experience tells us that, like the chameleon, Labor is likely to change its colours after the election, if it wins. We all remember Kevin Rudd, before the 2007 election, promising that, on budget management, there was not a sliver of light between himself and John Howard. What happened after is history.
If the debt blowout from Rudd and subsequent mismanagement is not fixed in the next few years, it will become our children’s unfortunate inheritance.
Philip Temple, Larrakeyah, NT
Austrian-born economist Friedrich Hayek wrote in 1952: “It is in the interests of wage earners for capitalists to make the greatest amount of productive expenditure” (“Tax cut gain ‘twice cost the budget’ ”, 8/6). The demand for labour and the demand for capital goods is determined by the savings of capitalists.
Federal taxes are approaching 25 per cent of GDP. Whenever the percentage gets this high, a recession follows. Australians pay more in taxes than saving.
Opposition Leader Bill Shorten is not interested in reducing the politics of plunder which has been used to create the welfare state. Labor does not like lower taxes. Progressives hate Australians who seek and hold dominion. Former opposition leader Mark Latham is right when he says this election is a referendum on the private sector.
Victor Diskordia, McKellar, ACT