If ever there has been an example of the incompetence, extravagance and an inability to properly plan by the Gillard Government, this is it. They promised every high school student in Australia a computer and now find they cannot even remotely afford it. And this is today’s front page story in The Age!

THE federal government’s scheme providing high school students with laptop computers is on the brink of collapse, leaving parents with hefty bills and educators with a chaotic start to the school year.

Schools are already telling parents they must lease approved laptops for pupils this year, at a cost of hundreds of dollars. Some are telling students to bring their own computers, raising a raft of problems around internet capacity, security and provision of software, as well as placing pressure on low-income families.

They make a commitment to some sounds-good proposition, find they cannot afford it and leave behind a mess for someone else to fix. It is their pattern. Their promises are worse than worthless; their promises will cost you big time when reality finally hits. That the NBN went down early in the midst of the floods in Queensland is another example how this government is leading us backwards at every turn.

I am to participate in a debate sponsored by the Australian Spectator on November 14 next week in Sydney. The resolution to be debated on the night will be: “Foreign Investment is Out of Control”. Those in support of the motion are apparently well known personalities to our north. There is a Sydney radio presenter, Alan Jones; a Queensland politician, Bob Katter; and a writer of children’s fiction, Rhys Muldoon.

Countering this ridiculous notion will be Peter Costello who will win this on his own, Tim Wilson of the IPA and myself. Personally I don’t even know where the other side will find arguments to support this idea but I will dutifully show up on the night to hear what they have to say and explain to them their folly. You can find a brief article on this debate here.

Should you be interested in attending, and it sounds like it will be quite a fun night, here are the details for booking:

Wednesday 14 November

Sydney Masonic Centre, 66 Goulburn St, Sydney

Doors open 6pm for 7pm start

$50* ticket $40* ticket for Spectator Australia subscribers

To book
Visit: http://www.spectator.co.uk/foreign
Call: 1300 438 849

Postal payments to: PO Box 1946, Neutral Bay, NSW 2089
Cheques to be made payable to The Spectator

*Excludes booking fee

Any suggestions on what to say on the night would be gratefully received.

Possibly the most intelligent document ever to come out of the Australian union movement was published in 1987 under the title, Australia Reconstructed. This did not make it on par with The Wealth of Nations, but as these things go – and perhaps there is a touch of nostalgia kicking in – by the standards of the labour movement today and its Parliamentary wing, it was the nearest thing there was to a union capitalist manifesto. My next five years were spent working to defeat its centralising intent but at least at its core was an acceptance that the market economy was not only here to stay but also had much to offer working people.

An important part of the Australia Reconstructed mentality (I can’t remember if it was part of the document) was the wish to spread superannuation throughout the working population, not restricting it as it was then to those employees an employer chose to provide superannuation to. The flaw in the proposal was that the entire cost of super was to be borne by employers and to cut a long story short we now have the Super Guarantee system in place that requires employers to put 9% of an employee’s wages cost into a superannuation fund.

Part of the argument against the super system that we put up at the time was that having such large funds that were both central and visible made them a target for governments to supplement their tax revenues. Generally up until now governments have been pretty good at leaving the system alone, partly from recognition that the savings generated are actually a good thing (not that it has created a dime’s worth of extra saving compared to how things might otherwise have gone), and partly because there is a third-rail element in messing with the retirement savings of the nation (not that anyone is better protected against poverty in old age than they were before). But today we have the Gillard Government, with its blind incoherence and social and economic incompetence as its most obvious characteristic, so all is different. They now wish to change the rules – only for the “wealthy”, of course – so that they can fund their deficits and balance their budgets without actually cutting back on their own spending, indeed with an intent to increase its level of outlays. Here is the context as reported in The Australian:

The federal government has been canvassing the industry for potential savings to meet its pledge of a budget surplus for 2012-13 amid collapsing tax revenue and a raft of spending programs in health, welfare and education.

Bill Kelty, the godfather of the superannuation system, the former ACTU Secretary, the one who didn’t go into Parliament, has been incensed. Well, sort of. From that same report:

BILL Kelty – a founding father of Australia’s superannuation system – has warned the Gillard government to stay away from tax changes to super in its search for savings and new revenue to meet the pledge of a budget surplus.

Mr Kelty said further changes to superannuation risked undermining confidence in the system at a time when years of volatile markets and low earnings had already made it vulnerable.

‘I think you’ve got to be very careful about changing the tax system and increasing it because there is increased uncertainty,’ Mr Kelty told The Weekend Australian.

‘These are decisions for a generation and when you start tampering with it then you don’t tamper with it for the day, you tamper with it for a generation.

‘So you don’t want to tamper too much with that and say in addition to the relative decline in earnings, what we are going to do is impose another adjustment process, that is a higher level of tax on it,’ he said. ‘That, I think, would be a very silly thing to do.’

I would not describe his words as a categorical rejection of the idea of tampering, not at all. If this is the strongest that will be said against the proposal to raid the super system, the certainty is that is what is about to happen. And the result, given the structures we have in place today, will be a worsening situation for those who wish to save for retirement and a reduction in our national savings which are instead to be squandered in areas favoured by the government which has shown hardly an ounce of economic judgment in anything it has done.

Our Treasurer last week described the Republicans in the United States, using the precise and diplomatic language he is known for, as “cranks and crazies”. Apparently he thought the Republicans were not taking America’s economic problems seriously, unlike say Barack Obama who apparently thinks US debt is around $10 trillion when it is in fact $16 trillion. Anyway, our Wayne thought it was the Republicans who were endangering the future of the American economy by trying to get some kind of debt ceiling in place which is why he used the phrase he did. He was then fully supported by the Prime Minister herself.

I have therefore had a look at this in an article now found at Quadrant Online which comes with the title, “Our Own ‘Cranks and Crazies'”. It begins:

Let me start with this. The justification for the mining tax was to ensure that the entire community would benefit from the minerals boom, the implication being that selling resources bestows no return to the rest of us outside the extractive industries and therefore requires a tax to share the wealth. But with the mining boom about to recede we are being told that, as a direct result, we will all have to get used to a lower standard of living. Absolutely right, but just as the loss of the mining boom has reduced everyone’s living standards, the boom, while it lasted, drove them higher.

Alas, our Prime Minister and her Treasurer were clueless about how we all benefit from growth, even in a single sector remote from our lives, and accordingly peddled one of the most ignorant and pernicious of all socialist memes: the resources of the nation belong to the people. The consequences of their tenure in office will be to our collective detriment for years to come as investors spurn putting their money into Australia, lest Labor return to the Treasury benches once again.

And this is the final para in which I focus on our Prime Minister and her Treasurer:

From the start they have never had much idea about what should be done and what needs doing. They have followed the socialist path of least resistance: re-empowering unions, spending money they don’t have, and because they have mismanaged our finances, leaving Australia literally defenceless in an increasingly dangerous world. The surest sign of Gillard and Swan’s poor judgment is that they can unselfconsciously go about calling others the very names most appropriately applicable to themselves.

If you would like to see what goes in the middle, you can read the whole article here.

The Government must be thinking about a March election, or even sooner, because they cannot possibly be serious that they will present a budget in May. Their latest fiscal horrors from The Australian:

WAYNE Swan has vowed deeper cuts to turn the budget around and post a surplus after last financial year’s deficit doubled to $43.7 billion from its original forecast 15 months ago.

Plunging company tax receipts contributed to the size of the deficit, slumping $876 million in the final two months of 2011-12.

The 2011-12 budget outcome, released by the Treasurer today, reveals a minor improvement in the final numbers compared to the May budget forecasts, with the underlying cash deficit coming in $661 million higher at $43.7 billion from $44.4 billion.

But despite the update, the final deficit is almost double the shortfall originally predicted in the May 2011-12 budget, when Mr Swan forecast a $22.6 billion deficit.