The media – at Labor's bidding, naturally – have been going after Senator Barnaby Joyce's recent comments.
Senator Joyce made the apparently unforgiveable error of saying that Labor’s spending over the forward estimates would be $1.4 billion, whereas the real figure is much higher: $1.4 trillion.
Labor’s attack on Senator Joyce would be hilarious if it wasn’t so pathetic.
The attack comes from a government that has increased real spending by 18 per cent over the last two years. This is the most rapid increase in spending since that economic powerhouse ‑ Gough Whitlam ‑ was in charge of our nation’s finances.
This from a government that has promised to spend over $1 billion per day in 2012-13.
And this from a government that will run up the largest deficit in our nation’s history. Not once. Not twice. But four years in a row: they will break the previous record in each and every year between 2008-09 and 2011-12!
And what, pray tell, was Labor’s main charge against Joyce?
That he understated the extent of their fiscal recklessness.
This is apparently a huge political no-no in Labor party circles and gatherings of Canberra public servants (Ed: aren’t they the same thing?)
You see, it just isn’t polite to get those spending figures wrong. Saying that Rudd is spending billions rather than trillions is in such bad taste, it is Canberra’s version of a Saturday afternoon barbeque stopper.
It’s right up there with other unpardonable social sins in the ACT - like saying out loud that taxes should be cut or that the budget should be balanced.
Has it ever occurred to anyone in the Canberra Press Gallery that it is just a little bit odd (and rather sickening) that Labor has sent out Australia’s worst Finance Minister in over thirty years ‑ Lindsay Tanner – to lead the charge of hysterical abuse against Senator Joyce?
It is Tanner, after all, who is directly responsible for the financial wreckage that is now this nation’s public finances.
Tanner has never seen a wasteful spending program that he didn’t like. He has cut as many dollars of spending from the budget as he has released credible cost-benefit analyses of his own policies: nil.
Tanner has delivered government waste in such creative ways, on such a large scale, and on such a huge number of programs that it has to be seen to be believed. His has been such an incredibly poor effort at economic management that is unlikely to be ever matched again.
Tanner will likely never deliver a budget surplus. He’s obviously trying to replicate the last Finance Minister who achieved that dubious distinction: Kim Beazley.
And Tanner is the man chosen by Rudd to go out and lecture the Coalition on economic management? Are these people insane? Or are they simply so arrogant and so contemptuous of the voting public that they couldn’t care less?
The most likely explanation is that they’re simply clueless. Remember: it was Tanner who talked about how Labor would take a “meataxe” to the public service, whereas the data clearly show that the public service is the largest than it has been in at least 15 years, and is probably the largest it has ever been.
Let’s face it: if Labor wants to use Question Time to talk about economic gaffes, they have plenty of raw material of their own to work with.
Does anyone remember the Wayne Swan slow motion train wreck – the most excruciatingly embarrassing two minutes in modern Australian political history, when Swan couldn't even remember his own inflation forecasts? It was so bad, even the Opposition winced.
Or when he couldn't answer a simple question on the relationship between inflation and unemployment?
Or when, with inflation running at just 3 per cent, said that the inflation genie was out of the bottle?
And does anyone remember that when Mr Rudd was Leader of the Opposition, he not only failed to answer a simple question about tax rates and thresholds – he simply had no clue about Australia's income tax system?
Mr Tanner reckons Senator Joyce is a freak show. Well, Mr Tanner would know. The biggest freak show in town is the team of economic vandals who in three months time will bring down their third budget.
By all accounts it promises to be an even more useless document than the first two disgracefully inadequate efforts.
No doubt they’ll blame Barnaby Joyce.
Milton
Von Smith is a Canberra writer
