I am not very old, and yet I remember the adults in my house when I was a kid screaming about interest rates under Keating. If I can remember that so can 90% of the electorate. Anyone who doesn't has older people to remind them.
Howard dealt well with his slip on rates last week with his declaration, "There's one rate we all remember, and that's the 17% rate under the last Labour govt."
Incidentally the 22% rate when Howard was treasuer was some bond rate that never translated into consumer rates, which never topped 13%. Significantly less than Keating's record.
Once again most voters can remember back that far and remember that the real cause for financial pain in the Fraser era was Whitlams's emptying of the government's coffers.
Labor = socialist spending = recession
Costello was right to insist that the coalition had done it's upmost to stop inflation. Their only flaw was to make the economy so strong. The media takes every turn to portray strong economic data and low unemployment as negative because it might result in high interest rates. Howard is dead right to push the line that they would not be any lower under the ALP, indeed they would be higher. This is choice people face, not a consequence-free whinging session.
The ALP's socialist ideology is the enemy of growth. Managing the economy at the governmental level is not just about fine-tuning, it's about ideology as well as experience and expertise. The coalition has it all over the ALP on all 3 counts.
The Rudd plan to address capacity constrainst in the economy is bollocks.
Newsflash: the biggest capacity constraint is the unemployment rate, and the coalition have done brilliantly in bringing that down. They can take direct credit because of WorkChoices and the eradication of unfair dismissal laws. A further attack on entrenched dole-bludgers will sort that out even more. The ALP voted against all these capacity boosters.
If there is a skills crisis in this country, which I doubt, the ALP will only make it worse with their socialist education agenda. Education is not about preparing people for work in a communist bee-hive, it's about the finer things in life, like poetry, independent thought etc. Techical colleges prepare people for work and Howard has brought them back. Rudd wants to take them away and blur the line between workforce training and education by building these workshops in schools (at great expense). Rudd's mantra that a trade-cert is just as valuable as a university degree is the greatest deterrent to education there is. It will rob the country of thinkers and leaders because youngsters will think 'why bother being smart. the chicks/blokes think i'm a nerd and now i cant even get respect from society. i might as well start doing drugs, or apply my brains to dealing them'.
Not all people are the same intellgence. Pretending that they are is part of Australia's cringing past that Rudd wants to bring back. if we stop making smart people feel guilty, they will be more likely to help the country.
One other way of addressing man-power and skills shortages is by increasing the polulation. Costello's 'one for Australia' speech has helped, as has immigration. The Coalition's insistence on skilled migration over bleeding-heart family reunions has aswell. In addition the insistence on learning English would probably help migrants be productive in the economy, dont you think?
Infrastructure might help build capacity, but funding infrastructure has always been a State responsibility and Labor has failed here. This started with the Franklin dam. People have been terrified of infratructure investment since the media portrayed the blockage of the franklin dam as the reason hawke won office - this is a falsehood, but that's another story. The coalition has done it's best to show the political irrelevance of the anti-job environmental lobby, as demonstrated by Rudd's me-too policy on the Pulp Mill. This achievement is the single biggest thing that has put this country back on a pro-development footing. The coalition copped the heat, but won out in the end and Australia aswell. Now the fight is over the ALP are pretending they were not the cause of it all.
The Coalition is the party of growth. The ALP is party of the economic past. We all remember 'the recession we had to have'. The memory of Keating and Whitlam is much more terrifying to the Australian public than the devil they know, Howard.
