Keating

[brian ross]

His deeds never matched his obnoxious and arrogant rhetoric.

That always endears him to labor voters, Black Orchid. It is always what makes him abhorrent to Tories like you. The PHONies supporters are those who got left behind because their inability to retrain and update their skills. The world doesn't need lamp lighters or buggy whip makers any more. It needs people who can use computers and can think.

[Juliar]

So our dreary dearie agrees that Keeting was another Labor failure.

[Black Orchid]

His deeds never matched his obnoxious and arrogant rhetoric.

That always endears him to labor voters, Black Orchid. It is always what makes him abhorrent to Tories like you. The PHONies supporters are those who got left behind because their inability to retrain and update their skills. The world doesn't need lamp lighters or buggy whip makers any more. It needs people who can use computers and can think.

Nor does the world need smug, obnoxious, arrogant, delusional moonbats like ...

[Juliar]

Keeting's legacy of failure still besets Australia today.

His Socialist neoliberal concepts were and are simply rubbish.

Little wonder the death of Bob Hawke right on the eve of the election did no favours for Labor. Probably the same can be said for Keating’s interventions in the election campaign. If anything, these events reminded many older voters with long memories, of bad experiences of neo-liberal free market fundamentalist economic policies.

Meanwhile, neo-liberalism marches on, virtually on auto-pilot. By now, the massively wealthy monied interests are even better placed to ensure their economic philosophies are widely promoted in the community. Only neo-liberal economists, CEO’s, board directors and the like, get appointed to head roles in the corporate world, including its vast lobbying contingent and private media outlets.




GEOFF DAVIES. Hawke and Keating set Australia, and Labor, up for failure
By GEOFF DAVIES | On 31 May 2019


We are all still suffering from their mistakes

Labor failed, again. It took on the most riven, brutal and monumentally incompetent rabble since Federation and still could not manage to beat them. This is a profound failure that requires a profound explanation. There is one, though it goes against decades of received wisdom.


The problem is the economic ‘reforms’ imposed by the Hawke-Keating governments are a failure. Our anaemic economy and divided society are their continuing legacy.

These claims are of course heresy. They sully the revered memory of Larrikin Bob. They contradict the economic and political mantras of the past thirty five years. Yet the evidence is clear and has been readily available for some time.

A few numbers tell the story. The average GDP growth rate in the 1950s and 60s was over 5%. Average unemployment was 1.3%. Those numbers should have set off raging inflation, according to current dogma, but average inflation was a moderate 3.3%. The numbers are from Ungoverning the Economy by economist Stephen Bell, published in 1997.

The economy has never approached that performance in the whole neoliberal era initiated by Hawke and Keating in 1983. Growth has rarely exceeded 4% and is currently struggling to reach 2%, while unemployment is routinely around 5%.

Yes but haven’t we enjoyed unparalleled prosperity, twenty eight years without a recession? No. We have an increasingly anaemic economy. We avoided a GFC recession in 2008 because the Rudd-Swan Government spent directly into the economy. Australia, uniquely among larger developed economies, avoided the Great Recession by briefly abandoning neoliberalism. The mining boom may have helped, but on its own would not have been quick enough or large enough.

Former Treasurer Wayne Swan has been pilloried ever since for running up government debt, but the debt was modest and not a significant burden. His real sin was breaking with the faith and, worse, being right.

On the other hand Hawke and Keating delivered our worst recession since the Great Depression. Banks make most of their money from ‘loans’ (in fact they don’t loan existing money, they issue newly-created money, but that’s another story). When they were deregulated in the 1980s they competed to throw money at ‘entrepreneurs’, and business sector started running up large debts.

Unfortunately much of that money was not used productively, it was used for unproductive take-overs and mergers by people like Alan Bond and Christopher Skase, who ended up broke and in gaol or exile. Nevertheless all that new money flowed out through the economy, which boomed through the nineteen eighties until it ‘overheated’ and the Reserve Bank jammed on the brakes in 1990.

Interest rates were raised to 17%, unemployment soared to 11% and the economy crashed into the Keating Recession. It was a recession we did not have to have.

The political ramifications of the Keating Recession were profound, and are with us still. Many older men were thrown permanently out of work and their bitterness was given voice by Pauline Hanson. The neoliberal project emphasised selfishness, drove inequality and left behind a resentful under-class that became ‘Howard’s battlers’. The Liberal Party continues to exploit them (in both senses of the term).

The failures of the neoliberal project are becoming so obvious that lately there has been some overt mainstream criticism of it. Few yet recognise that it never has worked and was never going to work. The economic theory behind free-market fundamentalism is such an irrelevant abstraction as to be a sick joke. The enforced dominance of selfishness over community is nothing less than a denial of our humanity.

Neoliberalism has yielded a hollowed out economy and a riven social fabric with deep inequalities of wealth, power and perception.

Labor’s continuing attachment to neoliberalism deprives it of any real vision. The result is the incoherent grab-bag of policies presented by Bill Shorten, which featured alleged action on global warming alongside a huge public subsidy of gas extraction in the Northern Territory.

Labor’s promised gift to the fossil fuel industry simply advertised the deep corruption of both major parties, who accept money from rich vested interests and pay them off with policies opposed by the people. The corruption has been magnified by the wealth concentrations yielded by neoliberalism.

There is little sign that any Labor MPs recognise any of this, so there is little prospect that Labor will undertake the fundamental change of direction it, and the country, needs. The Greens have some good policies but seem to prefer to remain a party of the fringe.

The only serious prospect for change comes from a few Independents. The most promising of these is Helen Haines, who succeeds Independent Cathy McGowan in the seat of Indi, propelled by the non-partisan Voices for Indi.

Our best hope would seem to be a crop of Independents who are unencumbered by the anachronistic traditions and destructive internal conflicts of the old parties, who recognise our current challenges and who are willing to look at whatever proposals might work.

Dr. Geoff Davies is an author, scientist and economics commentator. He is the author

https://johnmenadue.com/geoff-davies-ha ... r-failure/

[Juliar]

Hawk and Keating did something that no LNP government could ever dream of getting away with – they dismantled the worker’s basic defence mechanism.

Labor’s much lauded Accord depended upon big business keeping their side of the bargain and the punters walked into the industrial abattoirs happily gripping a few droopy roses.

The day that strikes could be deemed to be illegal was the day that the game was rigged towards rapacious capitalism.

How did we get to the point where young Australians could be ripped off?

That day had a birthday, and Mr Keating and Mr Hawk supplied the cake.

I’m glad that PK has realized the mistake at last, even if he has disowned his part in the sad little play. Is he trying to atone for his sins ?



Even Keating now admits that neoliberalism should be dragged out the back and shot
HELEN RAZER MAY 09, 2017

In an interview this week with Troy Bramston, Paul Keating restates his newly emerged view that neoliberalism is a crock.


Keeting - the architect of our DOOM ?

Look. I’m no Delphic Oracle, but if forced to lay my drachma down on naming the general character of Treasurer Scott Morrison’s budget tonight, I’d go with “neoliberal”. This era of economic policy — to avoid confusion, one characterised by the mobilisation of the state in the interest of firms — is on life-support. It is upheld not only by public assets, most evident in the US bailouts following the financial crisis of 2007-08, but by hot air.

Overwhelmingly, Western political leaders and commentators of all stripes refuse to identify the problems divulged by this era of policy. If poverty is on the rise, then this must be the result of bad parenting. If housing prices exceed the reach of young Australians, then this must be the result of them buying posh coffee. If wages are stagnating, this must be the result of unreasonable union demands. These last two claims were made not by overt right moralisers, but by Stephen Koukoulas, a putatively progressive economist, and a then-custodian of the labour movement, Paul Howes.


In his 2014 interview with Leigh Sales, Howes said that what was needed for wages reform was an end to “politicising” its debate. As if there ever has been a matter less political than one’s personal financial survival. This, however, is the public assertion made, even by the purported “left”, to justify 40 years of market-friendly techniques: wages are not political, silly. As David Cameron said, we are all Thatcherites now.

Neoliberalism is the horizon beyond which many are unable to see. It is not an avid reconstitution, as is powerfully argued by Mark Blyth in his marvellous book Austerity: The History of a Bad Idea, of classical models of economic thought, but something that is seen by elites as a natural end to world progress — a real End of History deal. Why fix what the god of Reason ordained?

Well, because it’s not working. The crises of housing, poverty and wage stagnation in Australia did not unfold due to a lack of personal virtue in those afflicted by them, but because capitalism produces regular crises. And you don’t have to be a material leftist to believe this. You just have to be Paul Keating.

In an interview this week with Troy Bramston, who is shortly to release a book on the former leader, Keating restates his newly emerged view that neoliberalism is a crock. Of course, being Keating, he doesn’t admit the part that his government played in creating present conditions — just ask him and he’ll tell you that all Australians benefited from the Hawke-Keating brand of neoliberalism-lite — but he does, unlike most others, actually concede that economic history has cycles.

Morrison will deliver a budget based on the belief that the “free-market” has a natural equilibrium. Notwithstanding all the hard work done by business-friendly administrations across the world to deliver this “freedom”, this is now the widespread view. Even if Keating dismisses the recent remarks by ACTU secretary Sally McManus that neoliberalism was always a bad idea destined to screw large numbers of people, he is, at least, urging for a dynamic view of history.

John Maynard Keynes, the economist whose thinking was adopted to address the crisis of 1929 and whose prescriptions were ended by Keating, almost certainly never said, “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” But, you know, he meant it. And so does Keating. Things transform and so, in a reasonable nation, must economic policy.

The fix for the problems of neoliberalism is unlikely to be more neoliberalism. To be, as today’s many undeclared advocates for neoliberalism are, personally moralising about it: you don’t reward a toddler for crapping all over your rug. If you’re an economic parent, like Keating, who combines authority with liberalism, you attempt to resolve the matter by containing your child, or risk an unmanageable steam-cleaning bill.

You need have no particular political allegiance, other than that to the classical fiction of market equilibrium, to know that things change, sir, and so must minds. When things changed to produce the Great Depression, the new technique of full employment was tried. When full employment produced the stagflation of the 1970s, as predicted, the new technique of neoliberalism was tried.

When neoliberalism shat itself, we applied more neoliberalism.

Neoliberalism has produced mediocre ideologues and difficult conditions for many in the nation and the world. Despite claims made by many in the press — particularly following the election of Emmanuel Macron in France — that this aging neoliberalism is a fresh new resistance, it will continue to produce harsh political results.

Keating is, of course, an arrogant man. But he’s not one nth as arrogant as those many, from the labour movement to the IPA, who believe that neoliberalism is the natural and apolitical extension of human nature. And he’s not as deluded as a man like Howes who believes there to be no necessary connection between politics and individual survival.

It’s time to change your mind, sir, and acknowledge the intimate link between politics and economies that neoliberalism has cunningly obscured. If minds don’t change, facts will, in any case.

https://www.crikey.com.au/2017/05/09/ra ... iberalism/

[Juliar]

It seems everything Labor touches turns bad. Is it because of their early union training as union brown nosers ?


Socialism turns people into sheeple.


How bad were the good old days of Hawke/Keating?
Posted on December 7, 2015 by Paul Frijters

Among Australian economists, the reform years of Bob Hawke and Paul Keating (1983-1996) have achieved near mythical status. Their governments have been credited with opening up the country to foreign competition via reductions of the tariffs, freeing industry from the shackles of the union, reducing industry subsidies, and floating the Australian dollar. Legacies of those days include HECS, superannuation, and the Productivity Commission.

If you arrived in this country in 1995 or 2000, the evidence that a golden period of reform had just happened would have seemed overwhelming.

But with the benefit of another 20 years following the end of the last Keating government, what would the verdict now be? What were the mistakes made by those governments that in hindsight have come to haunt us? I don’t pretend to have any definitive answers as I am sure many of the readers will know more about that era than me, but do want to share my suspicion that the Hawke-Keating governments caused a lot of economic harm that would not have been obvious to observers at the time. To briefly mention a few of my misgivings about the reforms in those years:

1. The compulsory superannuation industry set up in those days has given us much higher costs of retirement than we should have. Compared to Denmark and the Netherlands, where government-run superannuation funds have overheads of around 0.1% per year, Australian super-funds run at around 1% per year. That may not sound like much, but it means that over your whole balance, you lose 1% every year. On a working life of 40 years, that means you lose close to 40% of the first dollars you put in at the start on overhead when you take it out at 65. It means all those skyscrapers in the middle of our major cities belonging to superannuation funds are there because of policy, not competitive forces, as later attempts to force cheap default super-funds have by and large failed. And one should not underestimate the knock-on effects of the huge rents involved in these overhead fees: because unions and employers together get to decide which superannuation funds the employees get to chose from, the superannuation rules have an in-built incentive for both of those decision makers to be co-opted by super funds (and I encourage you to look at how many of them are now in the boards of these funds!). They have created lobbies to ensure that employees have no choice but to use certain superannuation funds (legalised monopolies!). Also, because superannuation is intertwined with income and income tax, a lobby group has arisen to allow circumvention of income tax laws, dressed up as investment and salary sacrificing. In effect, a whole industry of superannuation consulting and lobbying has arisen due to the anti-competitive legislation of the Hawke/Keating years. I don’t think this was done on purpose: just the result of poorly thought-through legislation. But it now is a reality, an economic drag on the system.


2. The Hawke/Keating years in hindsight saw the rise of medical cartels, kick-started by a policy of reducing the number of medical specialists trained at the unis (probably done for the purpose of keeping costs down), which gave the remaining medicos higher salaries which they subsequently tried to protect by keeping their numbers low. That arguably gave us the over-priced medical cartels that now have a large say on health policy.

3. The Hawke/Keating governments saw the rise of politicised ministries, media management, and what is called ‘managerialism’, in essence a form of hidden unemployment masquerading as compliance-oriented management and bureaucracy. The lobbies representing these hidden unemployed now bedevil education, health, and general policy-development across the board in government. See for instance, this Ross Gittins review of a recent book by former senior civil servants arguing a similar same point. The authors of that book tend to blame more recent governments for politicising the civil service, but the trends were arguably set in motion during the Hawke/Keating years.

4. The Hawke/Keating governments saw the privitisation of the then nationally owned Commonwealth bank, which in hindsight can be argued to have reduced the competitive pressures on mortgage interest rates and other financial products offered by the big banks. Again, with mortgage interest rates for households being easily 2% higher than the interest rates charged to banks, we are talking a huge additional yearly overhead cost on a large number of households in Australia, the indirect result of policy.

I encourage you to add your own examples in the comment box of the actual economic effects of the policies of the Hawke/Keating era. In hindsight, I am simply not sure whether to call the Hawke/Keating years the glory days of de-regulation, or the disaster years of a regulatory explosion. I do know that inequality increased a lot following those reform years, in part because of the tax changes then introduced. And the interest groups then created are among the biggest obstacles to a fairer society now. Perhaps that was inevitable and things would have been worse without the positive reforms of that era, perhaps not. It is time though to take off the rose-colored glasses and critically re-assess the long-term consequences of those years.

http://clubtroppo.com.au/2015/12/07/how ... kekeating/

[Valkie]

Keating put policies and processes in place that howard the coward lived off for his entire term in office.

But the thing I liked most about Keating was the way he effortlessly put down howard the coward every time.

Many time howard the coward had to refer to his thesaurus to understand the insults thrown at him, which of course meant he was left behind as the insults came thick and fast.

Love him or hate him, Keating was a true wordsmith, a true senator who could speak with a flair that none since have been able to emulate.

A true statesman , we have seen none like him since.
howard the coward was almost retarded with his inability to speak, I honestly believe the YANKS mixed him up with sir Barry Humphries, except that Barry was more articulate and far less corrupt.
Then we had Hawke, a likable chap, but a bum.
Gillard the Dillard,
And an assortment of others, none who could come close.

[Juliar]

The blind devotion of a Socialist.

Keeting was just another mealy mouthed sarcastic Socialist FAILURE. And his silly neoliberalism was just Socialist rubbish and Australia is still suffering from it today.

Everything Socialist Labor touched goes bad. The trouble is that Socialist Labor is just the puppet of the Unions and the awful depraved Greenies who HATE Australia with a vengeance. Recall how they set fire to Australia and burnt it to the ground ?


A statue symbolizing Socialist Labor's many failures.

[Valkie]

Keating put policies and processes in place that howard the coward lived off for his entire term in office.

But the thing I liked most about Keating was the way he effortlessly put down howard the coward every time.

Many time howard the coward had to refer to his thesaurus to understand the insults thrown at him, which of course meant he was left behind as the insults came thick and fast.

Love him or hate him, Keating was a true wordsmith, a true senator who could speak with a flair that none since have been able to emulate.

A true statesman , we have seen none like him since.
howard the coward was almost retarded with his inability to speak, I honestly believe the YANKS mixed him up with sir Barry Humphries, except that Barry was more articulate and far less corrupt.
Then we had Hawke, a likable chap, but a bum.
Gillard the Dillard,
And an assortment of others, none who could come close.

[Bobby]

Keating put policies and processes in place that howard the coward lived off for his entire term in office.

But the thing I liked most about Keating was the way he effortlessly put down howard the coward every time.

Many time howard the coward had to refer to his thesaurus to understand the insults thrown at him, which of course meant he was left behind as the insults came thick and fast.

Love him or hate him, Keating was a true wordsmith, a true senator who could speak with a flair that none since have been able to emulate.

A true statesman , we have seen none like him since.
howard the coward was almost retarded with his inability to speak, I honestly believe the YANKS mixed him up with sir Barry Humphries, except that Barry was more articulate and far less corrupt.
Then we had Hawke, a likable chap, but a bum.
Gillard the Dillard,
And an assortment of others, none who could come close.

Keating is the author of the greatest put down in political history: