On Rudd’s prognostications

Rudd’s bailout of the Australian banks - an outrageous benefit - is potent evidence of the danger of politicians and governments seeking to replace the market as the agent of capital placement. Bloomberg reported on February 2 that “Australian banks may have saved at least $500 million in the two months since Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s government started guaranteeing their bonds, freeing up money to help restore finances battered by the credit crunch.” All of which is great if you are a shareholder, but not if you are a taxpayer.

But just as obscene as Mr Rudd’s charitable giving program for the banks, has been his government’s pandering to the whims of the industry that has turned rent-seeking into an art form, the car industry. Twice since being elected to office in 2007, has the Prime Minister written out big cheques for the nation’s car makers. Meanwhile, as Tim Colebatch observed in The Age on February 4, Mr Rudd’s anti neo-liberal economic package released this week does nothing for the victims of the recession.

“Those who need it are the poor people who bear the cost of the recession on behalf of the rest of us: workers who lose their jobs, apprentices laid off, youngsters who can't even get into the labour market, and businesses and self-employed people who go broke. There is nothing in this package for them,” Colebatch wrote.

And this man spent his Christmas holidays - or so he boasts - penning a show off piece for a magazine on what a kind, compassionate social democrat he is, and how nasty are the neo-liberals.

Kevin Rudd’s The Monthly essay is intellectually lazy and seriously flawed. It’s a first year undergraduate exercise which, if it hadn’t been written by K. Rudd, Prime Minister of Australia, would probably have been stripped back to a few hundred words in the letters section.