Mood:
lyricalTopic: local news
Who gives USA press baron Rupert Murdoch permission via The Australian to decide our annual honours? No one. Just as no one here gives the house of Windsor the right to call themselves royalty.
It's all hierarchical nonesense and chutzpah. So why not join in the fun here at SAM micro news?
On the weekend The Australian pictured PM Kevin Rudd as "Australian of the year" for amongst other things preventing Australia from falling into recession after the Global (really western) Financial Crisis (as per Gittins economics editor Sydney Morning Herald).
Trouble is Rudd was just doing the bidding of Treasury Secretary Ken Henry who has more economic credibility than any minister in the federal govt including Rudd himself: Hence the personalisted targetting of Henry by the coalition Opposition. So Rudd as choice is gross sycophancy by a broadsheet on the media policy make - not least a future 24 hour ABC news service which will further cramp their influence.Even if it must have caused Rudd's rival Tony Abbott to groan with heartburn at the front page last Saturday.
No the real heroes of 2009-10 are Australian taxpayers and by this we mean all goods and services tax payers from the unemployed to the rich mansion dwellers. Because it's that regressive 10% impost on most, but not all, consumables that has boosted the public coffers from 1998 or so putting the federal budget in good shape. Yes over the same time we have seen major increase in private debt (along with economic expansion) even as public debt was slashed but crucially it provided the funds for the huge stimulus #1 and #2. And this prevented widespread social pain and suffering.
So Australians who go shopping and pay GST this last 10 years - take a bow. You saved the economy in Oct 2008-Jan 2010. Only the structural unsustainability of affluenza remains and there can be no more big stimulus payments, not for another 10 years of GST payments anyway. Meanwhile the structural debt burden is right now not 10 years away.
