The Economist magazine is beginning to look a lot like the Guardian, the New York Times and the Age in Melbourne: its editorial pages are so dripping wet that one has great difficulty in turning them.
How else to account for this endorsement of the Australian Labor government of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd for re-election on 7 September? Labor’s ‘decent record’ in recent years, it argues, makes it the best party to face the challenges of the future.
Yet this is a government that has turned a $20 billion surplus it inherited from John Howard’s Coalition in late 2007 into a whopping budget black hole and rising national debt.
A government that has imposed a carbon price that is five times as high as that under the European Union’s emissions trading scheme at a time when Australia’s trade competitors chug up the smoky road to prosperity.
A government that wants to spend $40 billion to deliver some kind of digital nirvana to every Aussie household in the next decade, without the faintest idea how it might be done commercially or whether consumers would be willing to support the huge costs of a broadband network.
Tony Abbott, the conservative Opposition leader, is hardly the reincarnation of Milton Friedman: his support for a big-spending paid maternity scheme, for example, suggests he is sometimes prone to paternalism.
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