I agree that allowing university to extend the range of subjects without any control of numbers was wrong. Preschool and infants school teaching does not need three or four years of university education on top of six years of high school. Neither does basic nursing, accountancy or electronic media and many other fairyland courses.

Forty or so weeks of a high quality course might be necessary for the senior nurse or two on duty in a major hospital but that should come after basis training such as that undertaken by the senior officer in a two man ambulance crew hospital and two or so years of on the job experience. A year or It should be relatively easy to estimate the number of students who are likely to find employment in each particular industry, at the end of their tertiary education.

If Australia is to provide education for overseas students (aimed to help lift their economies) then it should be in top tier subjects that demand high quality intellects. We might be more help to underdeveloped countries if we offered their more competent students high school boarding scholarships to our selective high schools and expand that section of our education system.

Aidan Quote "Australia is a sovereign currency issuer, and therefore has unlimited credit. The time to tighten fiscal policy should have been in the boom, when bigger surpluses could have prevented the interest rate rises."

You are missing a VERY important factor with that statement, if you print too much money with nothing to back it up with no one will want your FIAT money. Eventually your dollars will only be worth cents.

Many on this forum predicted the NDIS was a financial time bomb, which is now becoming a reality.

The jobs created by NDIS are none productive jobs they don't create any wealth they just suck up taxes.

Labor gets into power gives the people LOTS then the Liberals get into power and have to fix the Labor mess.

No, Philiip S, I haven't missed it at all. FIAT money is backed by the need to pay taxes, and internationally our dollar is backed by our exports.

But more importantly, I'm not advocating printing too much money; you're advocating printing too little! A balanced public sector budget won't solve our economic woes, and is likely to exacerbate them when the private sector budget is unbalanced.

There's a simple test of whether too much or too little money's going into the economy: the inflation rate. When inflation's high then either fiscal policy needs to be tightened (cutting the deficit or increasing the surplus) or monetary policy needs to be tightened (increasing interest rates to encourage the private sector to take more money out of the economy or put less in).

But right now inflation's low so we should be doing the opposite. But loosening monetary policy isn't working; interest rates are at record lows, but business investment is weak. So the responsible course of action is to loosen fiscal policy.

The jobs created by NDIS greatly improve people's quality of life, and for that alone they're a worthwhile use of government money. But more importantly it can enable disabled people to do productive jobs. It will take time, but we can expect it to pay off in the next boom.

The government's mess is not Labor's... yet. But this idiotic austerity policy is likely to leave Labor with a mess to fix next year.

Governments all seem to be struggling to balance their budgets.
They just do not seem to be able to find the right way to do it.

What the majority of them have not realised is that the old rules have changed !

The old rule of either pushing money into the economy or austerity are
now redundant.
Economists are slowly realising that the game has changed.

No longer is money the regulator, it is now energy stupid, to not coin a phrase.
What has happened is that there is not enough cheap oil and the economy
cannot afford the expensive oil.
Goldielocks is dead !
There is no just right price.
The price of affordable oil is lower than the break even price of the expensive oil.
As the operational mix price of these sources rises the economy will
suffer. There is a difficult juggle that will have to be done if the
production of expensive oil falls faster than the fall of cheap oil.

How do you balance what you can afford to buy against the rising price
of the cheap oil ?
It is this conundrum that has caused the current glut and reduced demand.

Nice try, Bazz, but the problem is that the governments have picked the wrong TIME to balance their budgets, not merely the wrong way. Pushing money into the economy is still effective, but it doesn't suit their political agenda.

Oil is much cheaper than it was a few years ago. And it accounts for a much smaller share of the economy than it did a few decades ago. It may or may not cause big problems in the future when it gets scarcer, but it's not the cause of the current trouble.

'Nice try, Bazz, but the problem is that the governments have picked the wrong TIME to balance their budgets

Nice try at economics Aidan however can you name one surplus that the Federal Labour party has had in the last 20 years. I take it that you and Labour believe its always good to promise a surplus but never deliver it no matter how good/bad the economy is.