A Pithy Summation of Peter Costello and his Budget

Mike Carlton in his weekly op-ed piece in the SMH this week says all that need be said about the Budget, Peter Costello and the Government's management of the economy:

Peter Costello is the piano player in the whorehouse. Gets no sex, does what the madam tells him, but the money rolls in so long as he bangs out the tunes the customers want to hear.

Tuesday's budget was for a good time, not a long time. A night of passion spent as if there were no tomorrow.

And I loved it. As a 60-year-old baby boomer, in the upper income bracket, with retirement more or less hull up on the horizon, I felt an election coming on as the Treasurer showered us with tax cuts and his wonderful superannuation reforms. I could have kissed him, along with the rest of the big end of town.

Thank heavens, though, I'm not a young couple mortgaged to the eyeballs and desperate to find quality child care. Or a teenager in casual employment, eager for job training or just a fair shake in the workplace. I'm glad I'm not a scientist, hoping to do cutting-edge research at a university of world-class excellence. Or someone chronically ill at the bottom of the ladder, unable to access the top tier of the health system which the wealthy take for granted. Or just plain poor.

The great myth of this Howard Government is that it has a genius for economic management. It does not. Given that the Hawke-Keating duo did the hard yards in unshackling the dollar and opening industry to competition, and given that we are riding a resources boom the like of which the world has never seen, it would be almost impossible to stuff the economy.

So long as nobody mentions our foreign debt rocketing towards half a trillion dollars, that is. And so long as we are prepared, as John Howard and Costello are prepared, to blithely ignore the iron law of booms throughout history, which is that they are eventually followed by bust.

When that bust comes, our children will look back on this budget as a wanton, profligate one-night stand.

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