The Liberal Party’s ACT Senate candidate Nick Tyrrell says Canberrans should be very worried about how Labor is wasting their money. Photo: Michelle Kroll.
There’s a problem with this Albanese Labor government that is now becoming a pattern.
An $841 million blowout on wages this year; a single minister spending an astonishing $100,000 on three flights to New York (not to mention thousands more on skiing holidays and convenient birthday parties); $20,000 for someone from the Future Fund to scout a hotel venue in the US.
The list goes on, and it is increasingly clear that this government has a cultural problem with unrestrained spending.
It has become arrogant and disconnected from the ordinary Australians who are funding the largesse.
The government is making an already difficult economic situation worse with its indiscriminate soaking of the economy with a fire-hose of our children’s tax dollars.
The government resembles the cartoon dog from the popular meme, holding a mug of coffee as the room goes up in flames. “This is fine,” it says, while avoiding questions and attempting precisely zero meaningful productivity or tax reform.
But everything is not fine.
This is fine? Not so much. Image: Public Domain.
Canberra families who were hoping to have some extra Christmas cash courtesy of an interest rate cut have been doom-scrolling news of high inflation, surging power bills, and reports that their mortgage costs could, in fact, rise next year, even as wages are forecast to go backward.
Meanwhile, many young Canberrans who don’t have wealthy parents are facing a bleak choice between starting a family or buying a home.
And either way, they are finding it harder and harder to get ahead because they are funding this government’s spending spree through their unduly high personal income taxes.
These people work in the private, not-for-profit and public sectors. While small businesses have been feeling the pain for a while, last month it was public servants’ turn.
APS employees would be excused for feeling whiplash, finding that after seemingly limitless expansion of headcount and still-growing consultants’ bills, the government has now hit reverse and is targeting the deepest cuts to the APS in 40 years. No mention of that in the lead-up to May’s election.
It’s unclear whether recently hired people (many of them entry-level and young) finding themselves out of work will see all this as cruelty or incompetence on the part of the government, but I find Hanlon’s razor (“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity”) to often be a useful guide.
The answers for those fearful APS employees and the rest of us may lie close to home, with both the Minister for the Public Service and the Minister for Finance, our very own local ACT Labor Senator, Katy Gallagher.
But as we have seen recently, whether in relation to approving $25,000-a-day silks to defend inconvenient HR claims, Jobs-for-Mates reports sat on for 2 years, or letters to department heads that simultaneously do and don’t exist, meaningful answers are exceedingly difficult to extract from Senator Katy Gallagher.
Australians deserve a government that carefully controls its spending. That’s what most households do, and it’s what sensible small businesses do because they have a lot to lose if they don’t.
I sold my house to start my business, and there were many times on the road to ultimate success that I agonised over spending a bit more here, or hiring a new employee there.
But a hard lesson I learned was that you can’t grow a business or give your employees security unless you carefully manage the bottom line.
This government, and the Finance Minister in particular, should learn this lesson quickly, or they may find the electorate decides to teach a lesson of its own.
Nick Tyrrell has been preselected as the Liberal Party’s lead ACT Senate candidate for the next federal election.
