Labor’s true believers taking Australia down the road to socialism. By Graham Young.
When Australians voted for Anthony Albanese they thought they were voting for some species of Bob Hawke, Paul Keating, Kevin Rudd, or Julia Gillard. But in the history of Labor these leaders, even the worst of them, were fortunate aberrations.
The ‘true believers’ have always looked back to Gough Whitlam, Chifley, and Curtin. This is a government of true believers. They will govern by the ‘light on the hill’. …
The government will be involved in something called ‘impact investing’ and ‘co-investment’. It will redesign energy, finance, labour, and social service markets. And this will be built on the clean-energy transition and an investment in skills and training.
Selective enforcement against political opponents:
Let me predict what this really means.
On top of trying to run their businesses, owners, and managers will now need to conform to vague and capricious values set by the government, and their agents, the bureaucrats.
There will be best practice codes that can be enforced by authorities, but hard to interpret with any certainty. Prices will be capped, and business told who they can and can’t sell to. (This is happening now, not just with gas and coal companies, but also the streaming organisations who sell us movie product.)
The Labor Party is funded by the unions:
Union membership will become almost mandatory, and businesses will be required to involve their ‘stakeholders’ (self-identifying busybodies) in management and governance.
Government control over the economy and spending will be ramped up:
The financial markets will become the enforcers of conformity to government objectives like climate change and diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Equality will be achieved by taxing investors more heavily. Franking credits will probably be abolished, as will negative gearing (while tax benefits will be bestowed on superannuation firms who build welfare housing). The capital gains discount will also go.
And all this will be rained down on a populace encouraged by post-Howard governments to think that if there is a problem the government should be relied upon to fix it.
If you think this sort of top-down approach will work, then you weren’t paying attention as the Covid-induced command economy misallocated resources so that welfare was wasted, the economy inflated, and supply chains disrupted. Imagine that in perpetuity.
It will be hard on us who live here, and discouraging to any sources of foreign capital who might think about investing here.
And all this proposed by a treasurer who has never run a business in his life, progressing straight from uni to a role as a political adviser.
Performance — who cares? It’s all about ensuring the right people get well paying government jobs and subsidies.
In reality, it doesn’t really bother the current ALP whether it works or not. Politics has ceased to be the idea of governing for all. Labor is owned by the unions, the unions see economies as zero-sum games, and this is naked self-interest designed to redistribute power and prestige away from other Australians to them.
This brand of socialism will be corrupted even before it’s begun. Sigh.
