Mark Latham's War on Everything

14 November 2007

Perhaps the clearest indication of the underwhelming torpor that has become the defining feature of this seemingly endless federal election campaign is the fact that its highlights have been provided by the luminaries of Labor past — Paul Keating and Mark Latham.

In June it was Paul Keating's virtuoso explanation of the key reforms undertaken by himself and Bob Hawke: the internationalisation of the Australian economy through tariff reduction and the floating of the dollar, and the suppression of wages — and consequent capping of inflation — through the Price and Incomes Accord. These bold reforms, said Keating, were 'natural structural stabilisers'. Keating likened them to 'a set of pneumatic rams' that 'adjust each week to economic conditions'.

When Keating accepted the invitation to launch Greg Combet's bid for the seat of Charleton he reiterated that it was his reforms, endorsed and enabled by the trade unions, that fixed inflation at around three per cent and laid the foundation for the future stability of the Australian economy. When Peter Costello inherited the job, Keating claimed, he had nothing left to do except enjoy the fruits of Keating's own labour and not blow the budget.

But Keating did more than just rip a gaping hole in the Liberals' economic façade. He also exposed Kevin Rudd's retreat to the supposed safe ground of 'economic conservatism', along with his parroting of the Liberal mantra: budget surplus, low interest rates, personal tax cuts. Indeed, the net effect of Keating's interventions was to further dwarf the already Lilliputian intelligentsia of modern Labor, demoting Rudd and Shadow Treasurer Wayne Swan to the rank of fiscal imbeciles unable and unwilling to take the economic fight to the Coalition.

The cold reality of Australia's much-celebrated economic growth, particularly as it concerns the electorate, is that it is fuelled by an unsustainable housing boom, driven by avarice, and maintained by federal ineptitude. As Andrew Charlton has demonstrated in his brilliant book, Ozonomics, the accrual of the current budget surplus has been at the expense of skyrocketing personal debt.

According to Charlton, the Howard/Costello duo has merely displaced public debt onto the electorate by means of the sale of public assets, the availability of cheap credit and the absurd buoyancy of the housing market. And now that we are beginning to see stress fractures in the economic edifice, the government's solution — progressive tax cuts — is but a short-term pseudo-response, a way

AUSTRALIA

Mark Latham's War on Everything

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