Australian Political Internet News Review
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PETER COSTELLO’S FIVE BILLION DOLLAR BUNGLE
What happened to the Federal Treasury’s $5 billion foreign currency swap loss? Why hasn’t more media coverage been given to this issue, and why hasn’t the Treasurer, Peter Costello, resigned? The only reason he hasn’t is because the media gives him an easy run, presumably due to his free-market, deregulation, privatisation, big-business stance.
$5 billion is an enormous amount of public money to have been lost. That amount of money could pay for numerous schools, hospitals roads and nursing homes to be built. Alternatively, it could pay for more than 10.000 teachers or nurses to be employed for 10 years.
The Howard government claim to be good economic managers, but losing $5 billion worth of public money by speculating on the Australian currency (and getting it wrong) is not good economic management. It is very bad economic management!
Peter Costello is the minister in charge of the Treasury, and he should be held to account for the loss. This monumental loss of the public’s money is not some minor little technical mistake by some faceless backroom bureaucrat. The foreign currency swap program was official treasury policy, which Peter Costello signed off in each year’s budget. What happened to the notion of ministerial responsibility? If losing $5 billion doesn’t justify resignation, what does?
In reality, Costello is as incompetent as he is self-serving. Kennett is alleged to have said that Peter Costello has all the qualities of a dog, except loyalty. If ministerial accountability means anything in Australia then Costello should not be able to get away with such a monumental waste of taxpayers money.
Unfortunately, more attention is paid to a handful of asylum-seekers trying to come to Australia that to how the government is actually governing the country. This is totally disproportionate and illogical. It costs Australia next to nothing to take in a few hundred extra refugees compared to the figure of $5 billion. In fact if the number of asylum-seekers coming to Australia doubled or tripled, and all of them were allowed to stay here, it would cost the government nowhere near $5 billion.
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Liberal Party Mismanagement Responsible for HIH Disaster
There is a clear conflict of interest between the Liberal Party's receiving of political donations from the insurance companies and their duty to regulate the insurance industry in the public interest. It is clear which interest prevailed - the interest of the donors, not the public.
Since 1995 the Australian Prudential Regulatory Authority (APRA) was considering new, tougher powers to regulate the insurance industry in Australia. The insurance industry opposed this. The government has had more than five hears to act on this, but has not. With the insurance industry donating hundreds of thousands of dollars that we know about, and however much that we do not know about through the Greenfield Foundation or the Free Enterprise Foundation, it is clear to see why not.
The interest of these profit-making companies has clearly prevailed over the public interest. Money talks.
We definitely need a Royal Commission to find out exactly what wrong. When over a billion dollars has been lost, when the government was supposed to be responsible for the company and industry in question and when the government is going to spend hundreds of millions of public money on the bailout; it is quite clearly in the public interest to get the truth.
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US ELECTION - SAD DAY FOR DEMOCRACY
The result of the US election is unjust and undemocratic. Firstly, Gore had a popular mandate as he won a clear majority (by hundreds of thousands) of the total nationwide vote. Secondly, it is quite clear that if the election had been properly and lawfully carried out in Florida, and all the votes had been counted (correctly) Gore would have won quite comfortably. How can it be fair for there not to be a proper recount because there is not enough time, as the US Supreme Court ruled?
In fact it is surprising the extent and blatancy of the (alleged) irregularities. The problems seem more akin to the US South in the 1960s, not the year 2000, with officials in polling booths in poor, black neighbourhoods acting illegally and apparently deliberately to thwart those voters from registering their vote effectively.
The result is bad for the US and bad for the whole world. Bush*s policies are anti-environment, pro big business, conservative, backward, anti-intellectual, and benefit the rich at the expense of the poor. The US is the worlds largest economy and most powerful nation, and other nations take the lead from the US in social, poitical and economic matters.
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Why can't the two issues of the very fast train and the new airport for Sydney be connected? If a new airport was included as part of the VFT then if the VFT wasn't viable before it will become so. Likewise, a VFT would make an airport a significant distance outside Sydney possible. This would solve the problem of aircraft noise as planes would not need to fly over residential areas. For example, if a very fast train travelled at 300km per hour to a new airport which was located 100km from the Sydney CBD, it would only take 20 minutes to get there.
In Shanghai, China a magnetic levitation ("maglev") train is being built from the city centre to the airport. The train can travel over 500km per hour! At that speed a train running from the Sydney CBD to an airport located outside the Sydney metropolis would take only 12 minutes to travel 100km! And the trip to Canberra from the Sydney would take less than three quarters of an hour, which is about as long as it takes to fly. Apparently China is becoming a more technologically advanced than Australia, or at least their government is.
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Why do people think that the federal Coalition government are managing the economy well? A recent opinion poll in the Bulletin magazine shows that the Coalition is favoured over the ALP to manage the economy well, and other opinion polls asking that question regularly show the same thing. This is unfortunate, because the facts show that the Coalition has not managed the economy well.
Major issues which the Coalition has handled very badly include privatization, where Telstra was sold for much less than it was worth, deliberately! (they actually boasted about the price rising by as much as it did); the introduction of the GST, where the cost of implementation and collection was and is greater than any economic benefit (according to Professor Peter Dixon in the GST Senate inquiry, advice which the government ignored); payroll tax, which the government had the chance to abolish or reduce it when the GST was introduced, but didn*t; fostering the anti-competitive behaviour of the banks by allowing mergers which restrict competition; wasting billions of dollars through the senseless 搒ay no to drugs?policy; and industrial relations, where change to industrial relations laws make the lives of working people worse, when the job of the government should be to make people*s lives better.
So what has the Coalition government done? Tax cuts to rich people does not equal good economic policy. The government also boasts about the high rate of economic growth, low inflation and fall in unemployment during its period of office, but there was a high rate of growth, low inflation and falling unemployment when the Coalition came into office. What has the government done to solve the economically costly soil erosion, salinity and water management problems? What has been done about the unfair situation where workers are sacked when the company that they work for goes into liquidation and can*t pay the worker*s entitlements?
The current inquiry into the contracting out of the governments information systems, sparked by the auditor-general*s adverse comments about the government*s handling of the matter, pobably a result of the government*s blind ideological commitment to the efficacy of the private sector over the public sector, is another example of the government*s incompetence. Blind ideology does not make for good economic management. What about the use of facts and expert advice? And the inquiry into the information systems tendering process comes after the department involved (finance) not long ago was found to have wasted a spare two billion dollars of public money through negligently omitting to forward trade on international markets to reduce.
So even though the government and its supporters claim that they are good economic managers, unfortunately their record shows this to be a myth.
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Australian Political Internet News Review
