Leo,

Well, it's either "in crisis" or not "in crisis".

Hockey repeatedly tells Australians there is a budget emergency and we have a crisis.

Then he toodles over to New Zealand and says there is "not" a budget emergency and no crisis....the economy is "not" in trouble.

He (and you) can't have it both ways.

As I stated, it's perfectly reasonable for the Treasurer to look at structural reform...it's not reasonable to tell the domestic audience one thing - and overseas audiences another.

One of Hockey's two scenario's is obviously a lie.

I wonder which?....

Of course the elephant in the room is taxation. There is no cause to cut funding anywhere, only to increase it. Progressive taxation is the answer but neither party has the courage to moot it.
This country is a political joke.

Pourot well said and David G you are on the ball as usual, how easy it for a Prime Minister like Abbott and others to send troops to a war zone, if they had to appear in the front ranks there would be no war I am sure, we must remember these leaders create war and then lay wreaths and attend services for the troops they helped to kill, what hypocrisy. The sooner Abbott gets sent to the rubbish bin the better, and takes Andrew Bolt with him
The beheading of two journalists is not good news but as stated earlier neither is the beheading of twenty three personnel in Saudi Arabia in August but no mention of that by Abbott or the Murdoch press, left to an obscure site to report.
Abbott is actually creating conflict with all Muslim people and the ordinary people of Australia, " Team Australia" has a very long way to go while we have a Prime Minister who thinks he is another Churchiill on the world stage, most people I know think he is a complete idiot, they being Liberal and Labor voters.
Lets all practise talking with our hands going up and down and walking as if we have big balls.

Poirot, even a dishonest lefty is capable of understanding that different questions have different answers andit is not permissible to use the answer to one question as the answer to another. You cannot be as stupid as you pretend to be. Wasting a billion dollars a month on interest can constitute a crisis in economic management without constituting a crisis in the operation of our economy.

Hockey also said the:”government's reforms were about continuing growth and stimulating other parts of the economy.
"There's no crisis at all in the Australian economy," the treasurer said.
"The fact is you need to move on the budget to fix it now, and you need to undertake structural reform to structure the economy in the years ahead”

: http://www.smh.com.au/business/the-economy/australian-economy-is-not-in-trouble-joe-hockey-tells-nz-20140726-zx6ie.html#ixzz3CLkf6Czx

Your assertions are puerile, Poirot

To Poirot.

Most people who's brains have not been wired backwards by the extraordinary socialist economic theory that money grows on trees and that you can spend forever, would consider Australia's $400 Billion dept a case of complete economic mismanagement. But Hockey is right, if we tighten our belts we do have the capacity to pay back the international lenders. These lenders have not rescinded our AAA credit rating because they know how the cycle works. Labor gets in and cleans out the bank account. Then it borrows and spends, borrows and spends to buy votes, but eventually even the socialist pampered unproductive class of the Australian population gets alarmed and they vote in the Liberals to fix the mess.

The USA went in because the southern Shiites and the Kurds were being wiped out by Saddam's remaining forces. The USA felt a moral obligation to aid the Shiites and the Kurds because after Gulf war 1 they had urged the Iraqi people to do the world a favour and get rid of Saddam. For eight years the USA protected the Kurds and southern Shiites with "no fly zones" to stop Saddam's air force from dropping poison gas on them. But the yanks wanted to go home. But they could not do that when Saddam told everybody he was working on building atom bombs. Then, when the UN imposed sanctions, he then claimed they did not really exist. He then played shell games with the UN inspectors allowing them to wander around Iraq looking for WMD's to get sanctions eased, then sticking guns in their faces occasionally to keep everybody guessing about the real extent of his WMD program.

You don't have to be a Mensa to figure out who was responsible for the invasion of Iraq, even a socialist Densa like you should have the wit to figure out that the whole thing could have been avoided except for the stupidity of Saddam Hussein. But no, good little socialist that you are, your brain works like this.

Bzzzt, USA always wrong. Bzzzt, "oppressed" third world minorities always right.

LEGO,

Thanks for the script.

I suppose you reckon Oz would have been better to introduce austerity and slide into recession post GFC like many European economies?

I don't s'pose you've ever thought of inking our debt to a percentage of our GDP.

(now there's a thought)

http://www.abc.net.au/news/linkableblob/3727694/data/possum-graph-8-government-debt-as-gdp-data.jpg

How many years of "continuous economic growth" was Hockey bragging about to the New Zealanders?...

23 wasn't it?

........

And thanks for the spiel on USA's altruistic intervention in Iraq.

Nice to know it wasn't merely for continued access to oil and continued influence in the region.

Strange how they didn't do the same for Zimbabweans in the grip of a nasty dictator, don't you reckon?

You know why?

Because Zimbabwe only fulfilled one out of the three requirements for US preemptive invasion.

1. It must be virtually defenceless

2. It must be important enough to be worth the trouble.

3. There must be a way to portray it as the ultimate evil and an imminent threat to our survival.

When the Bush Administration began trumpeting a nuclear threat, Saddam's neighbours (including Israel) dismissed the allegations - and they were further undermined when UN inspectors came up with nothing.

But that didn't stop the propaganda push that Saddam was an imminent threat to the US.- even linking Iraq to 9/11. Imagine, US citizens aren't renowned for the geographical prowess. How easy it was to get public sentiment to fall in line with Bush Admin propaganda.

They' backed Saddam until they decided not to back him.

And so bombed one of the Middle-East's most advanced countries back to the middle-ages, and opened the floodgates to every kind of instability and splinter group.

How was that helpful to Iraqis?