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Hockey won't be earning any such award. Sadly, in the short time he has held Australia's economic reins, the economy has tanked. Hockey has given us a great deal of colourful language about 'spiders in every closet', a 'budget mess', rhetoric about the age of entitlement being over, and to boot he has killed off the Australian automotive industry, took a shot at politicising the troubles at Qantas (which resulted in 5000 job losses) and took a shot at killing off SPC Ardmona.
Hockey hasn't been in the job long, but he has achieved a great deal. In fact if you were to suspend Joe from a large chain which was attached to his belt buckle and allowed him to swing through a china shop, he would do less damage than he has already done to the Australian economy... and that is before he delivers his first budget.
According to the IMF, Australia has the dubious honour of having the fastest budget deterioration of the 29 advanced economies that are being tracked by them. That's entirely the work of Joe and Matthias Cormann, and has nothing to do with spiders.
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Employment numbers have long been criticised for defining someone as employed if they work more than 1 hour per week, and as a result totally ignore under-employment. No one believes that anyone could survive on only one hour of work a week, unless you are paid at the same rate as Arthur Sinodinis was when he was working (but not paying attention) at AWH.
As the above graph indicates we are seeing a rising level of part time work and a falling rate of full time work... a move toward greater under-employment that misrepresents real employment levels. The Tories like to refer to this trend as greater workplace flexibility, and they are pushing for more of it through a workplace relations policy which will not be Workchoices in name only.
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What also skews the unemployment numbers is the participation rate - those people looking for work. That might seem a reasonable way to measure employment if not for the fact that significant changes in participation are based on people's belief about their likelihood of finding work.
Pessimism and participation are on the increase thanks to Joe's stewardship of the economy.
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The plan to 'Axe the Taxes' seems to be going ahead - which will further erode the income side of the budget by Billions, and which must then mean further cuts in expenditure if the Coalition hope to ever see a surplus while they are in government.
We are told that this is a government who keeps its promises, which means Abbott's signature policy (gold plated PPL) must be implemented, eroding the expenditure side by a further $5.5 billion. And while Abbott the Economic Illiterate claims this will improve productivity, people who know what they are talking about suggest the area to focus on is affordable childcare. Which begs the question, what have they got planned in that space. The answer - an inquiry that won't look at spending levels. I'm sure that makes sense to the Mad Monk.
Now admittedly the government insists it will find savings is in the construction of the NBN. Sadly for the government, this expenditure is 'off budget' so won't change the bottom line. The bigger question is 'at what cost' do we move to Turnbull's vision? And will it cost us more in the long run from reduced productivity, and from having to fix issues because we moved away from Labor's plan to 'build it right, and build it once'.
At every step, the Abbott government seems to be living up to Tony's slogan, and acting like a wrecking ball through the economy. You'd think that having a party controlling the Senate, which is in turn controlled by a successful businessman, we might reasonably expect Clive Palmer to step in to act in an economically responsible manner and stop Abbott in his tracks. But perhaps as many suspect, Clive is there out of Self-interest rather than the national interest. I guess we'll have a better idea about that come the 1st of July.