As Thomas Sowell has said, “Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it”. Well, not only intellectuals — Labor politicians are just as willfully ignorant. But then, as Anthony Albanese so amply demonstrates, socialist Labor politicians can’t even learn from their own failures.
When Julia Gillard — in whose cabinet Albanese served — announced a brain-fart policy to rival anything Kevin Rudd could scribble on a napkin, it was painfully obvious that it was going to turn into a financial sinkhole. The National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) was a black hole waiting to suck up taxpayer billions. Gillard’s claim that it was “fully costed” was an obvious lie, but she got away with it by the simple expedient of shifting the bulk of its costs off-budget.
A decade later, the NDIS has turned into a $30-billion-a-year monster, and rising. It’s set to become one of the biggest hoovers of taxpayers’ money.
And Albanese hasn’t learned a damn thing. With Labor back in power, they’re getting right back to doing what they do worst: fudging the books in order to splurge cash on their pet socialist projects.
It was a centrepiece of the policy platform Labor took to the election – the establishment of several off-budget funds that would contribute in different ways to the welfare of the people.
The spending by these funds would not be counted as part of general government expenditure and so would not contribute to the underlying cash balance recorded in the budget. Rather, these funds would generate returns that justified their separate status. That’s the theory, at least.
Ah, yes: the theory. Just like socialism works… “in theory”.
The three principal funds are Rewiring the Nation ($20bn), Housing Australia Future Fund ($10bn) and National Reconstruction Fund ($15bn). The government is in the process of securing the necessary legislation for the last two funds.
They are all ill-conceived. It’s hard to rank them in terms of the folly of their assumptions and their likely ineffectiveness and waste. To the extent that they lift current spending in the economy, the timing couldn’t be worse in terms of adding to inflationary pressures.
Not even the egregious failure of Kiwibuild across the Tasman is enough to deter Albanese’s socialist addiction to throwing other peoples’ money down the gurgler.
The Housing Australia Future Fund is a strange circuitous route to fund additional social and affordable housing. The idea first emerged in the budget reply speech delivered in 2021 by Anthony Albanese as opposition leader: “Labor in government will create a $10bn Housing Australia Future Fund, with the annual investment return to build social and affordable housing and create thousands of jobs.”
And how many houses will this $10 billion supposedly build?
A final point is that the target numbers for the scheme are extremely small – 30,000 homes in five years.
So, that’s $333,000 per build. Yet, ABS data shows that an average home build in Australia (houses or units) is around $473,000. So, that’s ten billion gone on building — if they’re ever actually built, and don’t simply evaporate before you can say, “Kiwibuild” — cheap knockoffs.
And we’ll still be left well short.
It is estimated that we need at least 200,000 new homes each year to cater for our growing population. There are also nearly a half-million individuals/households on social housing waiting lists.
The Australian
200,000 new homes… which is, purely coincidentally I’m sure, almost exactly equal to the number of cheap foreign workers the government wants to import each year.
It’s almost as if the solution to the housing crisis is staring us in the face, but no-one dares say it.