Yes the party is over! However, it's all too easy to outline our problems, without actually offering workable tangible solutions?
Without those solutions we could be enveloped by yet another Great depression as soon as 2016?
Almost assured, if Mitt Romney wins the American presidential election and then proceeds to seriously downsize the American economy with ideologically imposed idiotic austerity programs and tax cuts for the rich?
Who pay only half that charged, in straight % terms, on ordinary workers now!
My solutions include mining the Great Barrier reef for its probable bonanza of low carbon producing fuels and reforming the tax act to vastly simply it, add seriously to the averaged bottom line and household disposables/discretionary spending power!
As would be the case if we simply jettisoned the complete tax act and collection methodology, in favour of a single stand alone expenditure tax.
Which then would grow with the GNP, rather than shrink with a shrinking taxpayer demographic!
The GST ought to be replaced by the Federal Government simply assuming all funding for all public health and education! And state govts consequently seriously downsized to reflect just their remaining core responsibilities.
Many of the costs they now carry, could be offset by the substitution of largely unpaid regional voluntary boards, who would be made up of very experienced world wise retired or semi retired healthy individuals.
Happy to volunteer to beat the boredom; and or, acquire some kudos in their communities, or both.
A new tax regime and seriously downsized state budgets; and responsibilities, ought to produce some sizeable surpluses, which ought to be directed at cooperative local enterprise; and or, our own people and their better more innovative ideas.
Local enterprise that thinks globally but acts locally; and believe me, there is a big existing list that only requires assistance, financial and managerial, to seriously up-size and utilize economies of scale and much cheaper local energy provision, to expand into quite massive international markets!
Rhrosty.

Rhrosty wants solutions. There staring us in the face:

1 Repeal the Fair Work legislation. Reinstate flexible employment and continue the good reforms that were begun by Hawke and continued by Howard.

2 Stop wasting money. Stop running up debt (currently increasing at the rate of $100 million per day)

3 Stop the wastage and economic damage from:

a. Renewable energy schemes ($13.4 billion and counting)
b. Large-scale Renewable Energy Target ($10.5 billion cumulative to 2020)
c. Small-scale Renewable Energy Scheme
d. Nationalised Broadband Network ($50 billion +)
e. Disability, Dental, Gronski, ($20 billion)
f. Carbon tax ($30 billion cumulative net cost to 2020 according to Treasury but likely to be much more)
g. Subsidies to brown coal power stations ($6 billion)
h. Mining Resource Rent Tax ?
i. Defence Budget cuts $5 billion given out as a “carbon tax offsets” – actually middle class welfare and bribe

This (incomplete) list makes the money wasted on the ‘Pink Bats’ home insulation fiasco and the ‘Building Education Revolution’ waste look like small change in comparison.

Who pay only half that charged, in straight % terms, on ordinary workers now!
Rhrosty,
And I suppose you're still objecting to a flat Tax & National Service ?

Peter, we routinely waste around 26 billion per, on welfare for the rich?
If we had just one govt with the testicular fortitude to roll back this and very costly, counter productive things like negative gearing, the surplus could be very much bigger.
But particularly, if we simply substitute need for greed, in any and all govt largesse?
We had a much better world and far better more inclusive reforms, when conservatives alone, were the inherently decent, inherently Christian, progressive ones!
As opposed to the cronyism and brown paper bag corruption, that has so marked more recent examples?
Cheers, Rhrosty.

Individual: There is little difference between a fixed rate expenditure tax and a flat tax, save that an unavoidable expenditure tax can be set at a significantly lower rate, which can then be more than offset by then entirely unnecessary compliance costs, currently averaging 7%, as a direct unavoidable impost on the bottom line.
I don't recall ever arguing against national service?
Which in other forums, I've even advocated as the end result of enduring long term unemployment!
Please save the quite risible, mendacious verisimilitude, for those who have actually expressed the views you seem most concerned to parry?
You have a nice day now y'hear.
Rhrosty.

Geoff is right to point out that real net national disposable income is a better measure of economic welfare than GDP, especially when the terms of trade are shifting.

But what’s good for the economic welfare “goose” is good for the productivity “gander”.

If we are using net national disposable income as our welfare measure, we should also use that, rather than real GDP, for our productivity benchmark. If we measure labour productivity as real net national disposable income per hour worked, rather than real GDP per hour worked, then the apparent decline in labour productivity growth in recent years all but disappears. In the past 10 years, trend real GDP per hour worked rose at 1.0%pa while real net national disposable income per hour worked rose almost twice as fast, at 1.9%pa.

In recent years, high commodity prices have shifted the economic balance into the resources sector and away from other industries. This has been associated with a spectacular decline in mining industry productivity, and dampened productivity growth generally. But this does not tell the true story of our consumption possibilities, because with high prices every tonne of coal or iron ore we export can be exchanged for a larger volume of ipods and tee shirts.