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John Howard's bottom line : Comments
By James Cumes, published 29/6/2005James Cumes argues Prime Minister John Howard has a complacent vision for Australia's economic future.
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For example, on page 158 of "Australia's Welfare Habit" (2004), which uncannilly anticipates and advocates this government's current retrograde social, industrial and economic policies, the author Peter Saunders (who also has articles published on onlineforum) dismisses a proposal by the Brotherhood of Saint Laurence for government funded employment schemes. He argued: "The western world went down this Keynesian path once before and it led to the stagflation of the 1970's".
Of course, Saunders omitted to mention the oil crisis of 1974 or any data about the performance of our economy from 1960 to 1974 where the annnual GDP figure of 5.2% exceeded anything that occurred during the years of neo-liberal economic 'reforms' from 1983 onwards.
(However, I would hasten to add that exponential economic growth is unsustatinable and at some point soon we will have no choice but to cope with zero or negative growth as the world's supply of oil and other fossil fuels brgins to run out. However, the GDP figures still demonstrate that in its own terms laisseiz-faire neo-liberal economics is inferior to active government intervention in the economy.)