by ROGER CROOK – In Killarney, Ireland, a lost American tourist pulled up alongside an old man who was fixing a fence on a narrow country lane and asked, “Can you tell me please, how to get to Kilicracken?”
The old man took his pipe from his mouth, thought for a moment, and replied, “Well, sir, if I were you, I wouldn’t have started from here.”
- Australia’s decline in household income is the worst among developed nations.
- As a country, we are asset rich and cash poor.
- There must be change in government at the next federal election.
I have lived in Australia for nearly sixty years, and I have never been so concerned about the future of the country as I am now. If we are to restore Australia to what it once was, none of us would have chosen to start from here.
Like the American in Ireland, as a nation, we are lost; we are driving down a narrow country lane, we have no idea where we are going or what it will be like when we get there; the gauge on our national dashboard shows our fuel is low; it is also getting dark.
INSULT
The so-called budget was an insult to all Australians. There was a time when $5 bought a jug of beer, today it doesn’t even buy half a pint of beer or half a cup of coffee; what’s more we have to wait a year or so for this act of generosity from a hopeless government.
Now we have a General Election and a chance to change government.
Is either Labor or the Coalition up to the task; both have contributed to the precarious position we now find ourselves.
The question must be asked whether we have men and women in politics in Australia today who are capable of getting this country and its people out of the hole, they, the politicians have dug for us.
This nation is in a mess and more of the same from Labor of spend, spend, spend, will not do.
We need to remember Sir Winston Churchill at this time.
“I contend that for a nation to try and tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.”
Our national debt now stands at about $951b, very close to at a trillion, plus whatever the Treasurer added with the budget.
The combined debts of the States and territories amounts to another $403b and forecast to rise. Giving us a gross national debt of $1.3t.
Over the past three years, thanks to Albanese and Chalmers – and not forgetting Chris Bowen – Labor has added an astounding $63b to that debt, not including the billions promised in the past few days and weeks to buy votes with the voters’ money.
Capital expenditure on schools, road and hospitals is forecast by forward estimates to decline as a share of GDP.
The defence budget this year is $57.7b and we are virtually defenceless. Our current expenditure on defence is less than two per cent of GDP.
It needs to be 2.5 per cent and rising to three per cent over the next six years if we are to meet the modernisation needs of our ADF and equip them with the right equipment to defend this country.
The National Disability Insurance Scheme costs $42b and is forecast to rise to $50b by 2026 – the average annualised cost among the 555,000 participants is $63,000 or $172.60 a day.
Thirty-four per cent of the participants (191,251) in the NDIS have the primary disability of autism.
We need to find the reason why in Australia one in 23 children aged between seven and 14 have an autism diagnosis, in America it is one in 36; world-wide it is one in 100. Is it an epidemic of diagnosis?
Under this government’s $10b Housing Australia Future Fund not one house has been built in three years.
The rate of homelessness in Australia is higher than it has ever been; in the 2022 census there were 122,494 people without a home. Reports are that number has increased substantially over the past three years. The city of Darwin had a population of around 130,000 in 2022.
The story told in a Salvos commercial running on television at the moment; the lady with a bruised face living in her car with her son is true. All over the country there are people sleeping rough, many damaged and desperate; not all, by any means, are unemployed.
In the years 2021-22 net overseas migration was 170,900; in 2022-23 it was 518,000; in 2023-24 it was 446,000 and in 2024-5 the forecast is 340,000.
The net increase in the population due to migration is 1.4m in four years. There are about 1.5m people living in Adelaide today.
We needed to build a city the size of Adelaide over those four years to house and provide all the essential services like power, water, sanitation, medical care, education & transportation, police, fire, social services etc.
That didn’t happen.
So, migrants were crammed into our existing homes, infrastructure and services and now the nation groans under a pathetic federal government that lost control of Australia – and we’re all suffering.
Hospitals are full and ambulance ramping continues unabated. An appointment with a GP can take weeks; savage and violent youth crime is raging across the land.
With house prices among the most expensive in the world; the ambition to own a home has been driven out of our people.
The average median price for a house in Australia’s metropolitan areas is close to a million dollars and not much below that in the major regional towns; the aspiration among our young to own a house and have a family now depends on loans from the family or an inheritance.
It takes about five years for most people to save a 20 per cent deposit, then there is the mortgage for the next 20 years; for many it has all become too difficult.
What does that do for the morale of the country?
The wait list for social housing in Australia, which is for those on low to moderate income and those with disability, continues to grow.
In 2024 there were 169,000 households around Australia on that list; there are five hundred on that list in my small regional town with a population of about 38,000.
Rent in my town is advertised at $200 per week for one room with shared services. Median rent across Australia is $627 a week; Sydney $770 a week, Adelaide $600 and Hobart $547.
HUNGRY
At just two people per household that means 338,000 people on the social housing wait list. Many will be paying a rent which leaves little for food and other essentials. Children in Australia are going to school hungry. How can this be? This didn’t even happen in war time.
There are 340,000 people living in the NSW city of Newcastle.
The lack of housing is the major tragedy in Australia today. We need another Adelaide to house the past four years of migration; another Newcastle to house those on the national social housing wait list and another Darwin to house the homeless. We have failed our people.
Australia’s richest two hundred and fifty people are worth $689.52b; and we still cannot house our homeless and those in need; this is Australia’s biggest failure.
I would like to have 10 per cent of their wealth on loan for twenty years; build houses on the dividends and use the capital as collateral to build more.
Will it happen? No.
Why? Ask someone else.
I don’t understand that amount of wealth when there are so many without. Maybe we need another Cadbury or Lever family, those industrialists built towns for their employees.
Then there are Australia’s big dollar numbers.
The Commonwealth’s gross debt (our debt) of nearly a trillion dollars amounts to $37,000 per person.
SUFFERING
Macro Business Australia claims we have suffered an 8.4 per cent decline in real per capita household income in recent time, greater than the 3.6 per cent decline we experienced during the recession of the early nineties.
Of great concern is the addition of net State debt per capita. According to Adept Economics, in NSW it is $21,000; Victoria $30,000; Queensland $20,000; WA $16,000; South Australia $22,000 and the same as Tasmania.
In Victoria, once the manufacturing power house of Australia, the combined State and federal debt, per person is about $67,000.
For a family of four, that means it is $268,000. At an interest rate of 7 per cent, the annual repayments, interest only, would be $18,760 or $1500 a month. Does Albanese or Dutton realise this?
These are debts that few know about, yet they are paying the interest and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. The interest bill on the federal debt is forecast $122 billion over five years, or $60 million a day.
The national debt is forecast to increase in the future. When Howard and Costello lost government to Kevin Rudd, there was money in the bank; Rudd spent it and then the borrowing began.
Margaret Thatcher said: “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.” How right she was.
Is it any wonder the OECD asserts that Australia’s decline in household income is the worst among developed nations.
This proves, contrary to what our Prime Minister and his useless Treasurer claim, that we’re in a far worse quandary than the rest of the world.
We are exceptional as a nation, and Labor are an abysmal government; their inability to manage the affairs of this country proves to us that there must be change at the next General Election.
The profligacy of this Labor Government will drive us into what the Treasurer Chalmers idol Paul Keating forecast, a banana republic.
RESCUE
If we are to stir ourselves and prove our exceptionalism; if we are to rescue our country, if we are to restore national pride and once again give Australia the drive and vitality that earlier generations exhibited; like the Irishman said, not one of us would have chosen to start from here.
But the next government must start from here. Where we are in 2025 is the challenge they must face; and over the next month or so tell us how they are going to rescue this nation.
Do Dutton and Albanese look at the positives? Do they ever ponder our national balance sheet and compare the size of the assets to the size of the debts of this nation to the number of people who live here?
The atrocious management of our assets in minerals, fossil fuels and agriculture are the reason we are in debt. As a nation we are asset rich and cash poor. And we have spent more than we have earned and even a child knows where that leads.
The reason for this parlous state of affairs is the years of incompetence in national and state governments; they have shown themselves to be unable to manage the wealth of this nation, they have chosen debt and penury instead.
The challenge for the next government is not how to give back to the people the cost of half a cup of coffee in twelve months, or half a tank of petrol a month, it is how they are going to repair this country.
They have to tell us how they are going to manage the assets and make this country wealthy and prosperous. A nation which our children can be proud, as we once were and will be again.
This is their last chance.PC
The Government should be shut down over the Covid19 poisoning of the nations genome with mRNA and GMO’s, then put Gerard Rennick in as PM and restore the original constitution problem solved.
What we need is better government. What I expect from Dutton and the Libs is slightly better government. Still, that will be better than another term under the Labor twits.