The Week that Was.

The talk of the week was the Economic and Fiscal Update delivered jointly last Thursday by federal Treasurer Josh Frydenberg and federal Minister for Finances Mathias Cormann.

The main figures? Here goes, courtesy of The New Daily:

(source)

And this:

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Unsurprisingly, the punditry came out in force to comment on the “eye-watering” figures, “the biggest deficit since World War II”, “first recession in over 28 years,” so on and so forth.

Not to be outdone, former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd quickly got ahold of a series of federal net debt figures corresponding to the Labor period (2009-2012) and the subsequent COALition period (2012 to date), superposing how the COALition evaluated debt levels under Labor at the time and how they evaluate debt levels under their own government now.

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“Morrison and the Murdoch Party”, Rudd wrote, “finally and formally admit their entire, decade-long ‘debt and deficit’ campaign against our government was a lie from beginning to end”.

This is what he meant: if $48B of Labor net debt was “unbearable” in 2009, and $90B was “crippling” in 2010, then a COALition net debt of $488B in 2020 and $677B in 2021 can’t be merely “manageable”.

After receiving the ball from MrKRudd (as Rudd identifies himself in his Twitter account), Michael Pascoe went straight for a goal against the COALition goal-line.

Pascoe and MrKRuddE have a point. They forgot, however, that Labor itself contributed to the “decade-long” campaign, by pretending to believe public net debt is a big deal and a balanced budget is the hallmark of good economic policy.

Never mind, Andrew Probyn is there to remind them and us of the Lib/Lab past record.

What’s worse is that facing the future, Labor has shown no sign it learned anything from that: by March 31, hours after the COALition announced the manageable Morrison mega-spending spree, Labor Shadow Treasurer Jim Chalmers (a self-declared fan of “balance budgetarian” Richard Holden) was already apologising in advance for an eventual Labor Government’s austerity: “One of the consequences of this is that we will be saddled as a nation with a generation of debt.”

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This week Scotty from Marketing also cut the JobKeeper wage subsidy and the JobSeeker unemployment benefit.

Morrison alleged the JobKeeper cut was required because the unemployed were rejecting an avalanche of job offers because the $1.1K per fortnight Centrelink paid them exceeded what the job offers paid.

In other words, JobSeeker established a wage floor below which wages cannot fall. So, instead of suggesting capitalists should raise their offers, God forbid, or to give unions extra power to negotiate higher wages, the solution Morrison found was to further attack the unions (aka industrial relations reform) and lower the wage floor.

(Do your remember that just a few months ago those same “mum and dad” capitalists were shedding bitter tears after having to let their beloved staff go? They’re happy to re-hire them now … on a discount.)

NewStart Allowance redux.

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Everyone on JobKeeper will lose with that cut, but the worst hit will be casual workers (that is, those Morrison did not entirely exclude from the subsidy out of his ideologically motivated ill-will towards workers and the vested interests of capitalists to have cheap labour). To be fair with Morrison, their new two-tier system takes advantage of Labor’s non-stop quest to show off their fiscal conservatives credentials.

For all the words of Labor and Greens, so far, only the union movement, especially the ACTU, have tried to do something to extend the now reduced benefit to that almost million casual workers excluded. It’s been an uphill battle.

It’s time to help them out. The ACTU is promoting a number of petitions, two of them related to casual workers:
    1. Coronavirus: Extend JobKeeper and JobSeeker
    2. Coronavirus: Guarantee Paid Special Leave For All Workers
This is the ACTU website and this the Australian Unions website. Both provide ways to identify and join the union that covers you.

ACTU also needs funding. Readers can donate directly to them.

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Luke McGregor, of “Rosehaven” fame, presented this segment during this week’s episode of “The Weekly with Charlie Pickering” (a comedic take on the news).

Prof. Bill Mitchell seems happy with it. So, maybe McGregor and Alan Kohler should tell their ABC colleagues to relax about the whole “paying the debt” thing.

With a little help from friends like Holden, the Lib/Lab dictatorship will certainly try to fool us into repaying that debt, as it morphs from manageable into crippling. But we need to understand that it’s up to us to swallow or not their claptrap.

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MMTers have good reasons to feel cocky. They are going mainstream. Good for them!

Spare a thought, however, for Steve Keen, their not-quite-MMT fellow traveller. Ten to twelve years prophesying an imminent recession in Australia, caused by catastrophic collapse of the local housing market, and ten to twelve years said recession stubbornly refusing to comply.

To add insult to injury, when the bloody thing finally decided to come, what caused it was not Keen’s formidable, Hari Seldon-like maths of housing bubbles, chaos and complexity, but a tiny, teeny-weeny self-reproducing particle of organic matter one millionth of a millimetre in diameter. Housing prices fall and rise, but so far no defaults epidemics seems imminent, recession or no recession.

Thank goodness, Keen has some very generous, patient and understanding financial backers.