EmperorJulian, for the record I was appalled with the sale of Testra.

However, the libs reasons for selling off assets wasn't to fund the likes of the boat people fiasco, rather, it was to repay the huge labor debt of the day.

Today, we probably have a similar debt (in real terms) but, we literally have nothing left to sell, and if we do, whats left.

If the illegals situation was to stop immediately, very doubtful, we would still struggle to repay this debt, as you must remember, we are also trying to fund labors unfunded policies they are going to leave behind.

Finally, without a doubt, the most important factor for a strong economy is confidence.

I say this because whether it be small, medium or big business, or even the Joe average on the street, they all have one thing in common, that being that they are always hesitant to spend money if they don't think/know they can replace it.

Confidence is something that was skynhigh with Howard/Costelo and is lower than rock bottom with this mob.

Reinstating confidence starts with business, and flows down the line from there.

Fix this problem and we are on our way back.

The fact that the federal budget has gone so wrong in just three months from its release in May points to the lack of integrity by those who authored it. The deficit for 2013-14 is now projected to be $30 billion or 1.9% of GDP. This is a lift in the forecast deficit of about $12 billion. The original forecast deficit was wrong by a whopping 60%.

The author either has a very short memory , or else is trying to out-spin accomplished spinner Kevin13.

Further to the myth of the Lib surplus, information has come my way which was what I had suspected. It wasn’t good economic management – they sold off the nation’s public assets. Here is a ballpark figure for the proceeds of the sales. It’s from an unsigned leaflet and I have no source to quote. As the corporate sector owns the Liberal Party one can guess that the nation will have received a poor bargain.

1. Airport assets (long term leaseholds followed by trade sales) $7.252 bn
2. Transmission towers (ABC and SBS) $0.65 billion
3. Railway assets $2 bn
4. Australian Industry Development Corporation $0.2 bn
5. Commonwealth Funds Management $0.063 bn
6. Telstra initial float
7. 167 tonnes stored gold $2.4 bn [1]
8. In addition there was sale of 51% of the Commonwealth Bank after Keating had flogged off the rest. Howard’s sale was by float at $10.40 a share. You’d have to be an accountant to figure out what that brought – a very rough guess is half its $8 bn value [2]

This comes to around $16 ½ bn

[1] Sold 167 tonnes gold (worth about $6 bn) returning just $2.4 bn, via a single broker engaged without tender.

[2] http://www.uq.edu.au/economics/johnquiggin/JournalArticles01/CBAPrivatisation01.html


I think the Libs must have scooped out most of the national treasure left ungrabbed by Keating though there's still the schools and universities and Medicare and the public hospitals and of course the ABC and SBS.

Any source for the "$100 bn deficit" Keating was supposed to have left?

Australia does suffer due to our current account deficit but that requires an industry policy to ensure that essential industries survive.
Foyle,
Well, you'd better go out & ask all the Labor supporters why they're so hell-bent to not do anything about it. After all they caused this deplorable situation.

EmperorJulian can I ask, your quoted figures on gold, are they at today's prices, or at the prices when they were sold?

Remembering that gold spiked in the early 90's to about $700 an once, then fell to below $200, before rebounding ever since 911.

Furthermore, I don't understand the use of the words 'gold and tonnes' in the same sentence, as gold is weighed differently to all other items.

Where as there are 16 oz in a pound, gold is only 12 oz. So how many ponds of gold make up a tonne?

As for the selling off of our assets, I fully agree that we should never have done so.

What I feel we should have done was used people's super to build infrastructure (assets) rather than allow our greedy investment houses to gamble with people's future, at a healthy profit to the brokers I might add.

Just think, since super started back in the early 90's, there is now trillion of dollars worth of super and we could have been debt free and our refugees could be on a decent pension.

Talk about missed opportunity.

Rehctub:

The calculation is rough because I don’t know when the rort was perpetrated and hence don’t know the value of an ounce at the time. Current price is $US 1500. I took a wild guess at $A1000. As I was in rough approximation territory I used 28g to an avoirdupois ounce as I knew it and would have needed to look up the mass of a troy ounce (turns out it’s 31g against 28g for avoirdupois)

167 tonnes = 167 million grams = 0.167 billion grams
At 28 grams to the ounce that is 0.006 billion ounces = 6 billion dollars
At 31 grams to the ounce that is 0.0054 billion ounces = 5.4 billion dollars

If a nation wants to build it needs advance money.
1. It can borrow it
2. It can print it
3.It can decide not to build

My recipe would be to borrow up to a limit of prudence or print up to a limit of prudence or to do both, or to abandon the project if it is merely to build a stash of armaments for supporting colonial ambitions, especially the colonial ambitions of a very foolishly trusted ally.

I'd rather borrow from the foreign banksters than from superannuation funds because if the money couldn't be repaid I'd rather leave the foreign banksters hanging out to dry (as the Europeans should do) than the Australian superannuants.