There is something wrong with your last sentence, Don.

"Why can't we be like Greece?"

OR

"We can't be like Greece"

might make sentence- sense, though I puzzle over what each might mean.

West's verdict on the election makes some sense. Though nobody knows the result yet, especially in the Senate. Hanson may yet win three seats, or maybe one. And so on.

Hi Aidan,

No country in the world is 'financially sovereign', not the US, China, Greece or Australia. Every government either has to borrow, at international rates based in part on their credit rating, like us (or Greece), or park surplus funds in the most reliable and best-paying bond markets, as China does in the US.

If a country's credit rating declines, its borrowing costs - interest - are likely to go up. Also, as its total public debt rises as a proportion of the GDP, international lenders would be likely to increase interest rates.

And, since a country has to borrow if it doesn't have sufficient short-term funds for its budgetary commitments, the larger the shortfall in revenue, the more it has to borrow, for longer terms, and the larger the interest rates are likely to be. The relatively harder it would be to pay back both the interest and the principal. The interest bill would have to be added to the budget deficit, compounding the problem in future years. Hence the Grecian spiral.

'Sovereign' ? Like a sieve, maybe.

Cheers,

Joe

Cobber the hound said, "Angela Merkel has been Chancellor of Germany since 2005 and never enjoyed a majority", yes & just look at the mess they are in. They are running like the devil was after them, & he is. They sure as hell wish they had never heard of off shore wind parks, & more of their states are effectively banning windmills with proximity restrictions.

Billions of dollars worth of windmills doing nothing useful, like supplying power, & industry heading for anywhere with sensible power prices.

Give us a hung parliament, & senate, & we will have ratbag greenie tail wagging our dog, just when we need some rational cost cutting.

God help us.

With Malcolm at the helm, it will be a real circus!

He couldn't run a flea circus let alone a divided nation like Australia and its craven oligarchs of which he is one.

Malcolm will take us to war soon enough, make a lot of money from selling arms and giving out country to the 'exceptional ones's who war and whore and destroy all over the world.

I give an increasingly tired, disorientated, Turnbull till February (if not before) when he will be "Party Roomed" (new verb, you saw it first on OLO). He may be replaced by an unready compromise candidate (like Morrison) or a rightwinger (like Dutton) or non-entity (like Andrews).

Turnbull gets stressed out when he can't control a situation.* And a near hung Lower House and Hung Senate is such a situation.

* Who can forget Turnbull's dysfunctional performance as Opposition Leader (2008-09). Turnbull's support for Rudd's Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme and opportunism over Utegate-Gretch rightly did him in. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malcolm_Turnbull#Leader_of_the_Opposition .

We are now embarking on Lord Turnbull's typical pattern - unprincipled risks with other people's interests.

For Waverley: My 'Why can't we be like Greece...' was meant to be ironic. Plainly I should have found a better way to express my concern that people would think the fact that others were in trouble was no reason to stop our also being in trouble.

And, for Aiden, I am not opposed to borrowing to invest in infrastructure that will yield a real bonus to the society. But that is not what we are doing. We are borrowing to pay the bills for our weekly shopping: there is a deficit in the current account, and it is growing.