The commonwealth dental scheme was a limited solution, i believe was only for 3 years correct me if i am wrong.
There was no long term thinking when labor did this.

But labor did cut the defence spending and downsized the defence force.
Labor also cut veteran affairs.
Labor also gave us the recession we had to have. All those that lost everything must have enjoyed that.

Labor states only give us 60% of what the federal government gives us.
The unions are only interested in labor getting in.

See this is all about the parties.

I see that living standards have changed and that is due to us. Hello if you have a visa card or any other does johnny make you use it.
Does the government make you by that surround sound system,plasma tv.

If you are going to blame anyone look ina mirror and take a look at yourself before casting the stone for blame.
Just like the corruption,sexual assaults,child abuse and peadophiles within these parties it is us who should share the blame and media for not getting the facts out there.

Do it right use your voice, or just roll over like you all do.
Enough is Enough
I will call a spade a spade and the labor party fits that.
Telling the people the facts and the resume labor doesnt want the people to know.

Stuart Ulrich
Independent Candidate for Charlton

James there is an article in the Quarterly Essay Issue 25 2007 called 'Bipolar nation: how to win the 2007 election' by Peter Hatcher, which discusses the economic myths associated with Labor and Liberal. The other thing that Hatcher notes is that National Security is the other key thing in the election.

I don't think Labor or Liberal can manage the economy in a changing world.

Their support of logging old growth forests in Tasmania is a disastorous thing for Tasmania's huge tourism industry. Tourism, not logging is the key to Tassie sustaining its economy. Thankfully the Greens have protected Tassie's economy over the past two decades through their progressive policies.

Both Labor and Liberal will continue to waste tens of billions of dollars on unnecessary war each year.

Howard's changes to the uni system means that full fee paying places are making up a higher percentage of enrollments and the general cost of study is going up.

The argument used by Howard, and seemingly followed by Labor is that we can't make a big response to climate change because it will damage the economy. In fact it is the other way around - unless we can do all we can to reduce greenhouse emissions then our economy will crash.

Labor and Liberal's failure to roll out solar power across the country means we will continue to pay more and more for our dirty energy whereas if the subsidies were on solar then after some years we would be getting a lot of our energy for free.

Both parties have remained ignorant of peak oil and thus household costs for transport and groceries will continue to rise.

The supposedly low unemployment rate is rubbish. The casualisation of the workforce means it's no longer a good measure of strength.

The Greens are the future for a sustainable economy in Australia and we need to get as many of them in the senate as possible.

Firstly, thank you for all of the kind and encouraging posts. These have borne out my hope that many would have found the article useful, even though it was not as long and as comprehensive as time constraints allowed me to make it.

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Rhian, I concede that possibly more economists, in discussions amongst themselves, are critical of the GDP measure than I was aware.

However, the fact remains that the GDP and other flawed measures of economic performance - inflation, unemployment, interest rated and various stock market indexes - are used to misinform the public about the levels of economic competence of governments such as that of John Howard.

Possibly 'gross domestic consumption' is a better measure than the GDP, but it doesn't address my objection that all of the extra material consumption of today does not necessarily translate into a better quality of life. As just one of the examples in my article would show, it is ridiculous to hold that the necessary higher consumption of natural resources necessary for more greater numbers of people to commute to work over longer distances through far more congested roads improves their quality of life.

Again and again economic 'rationalists' implement policies which common sense and logic tells us are harmful to our own best interests - privatisation of Telstra, Qantas, the Commonwealth Bank, insurance companies, publicly owned buildings and land, etc, underspending on education and training, health and infrastructure.

Yet proponents of these policies have been able, again and again and again, to dismiss the sound factual reasoned cases against these policies by citing false measures of prosperity including the GDP etc.

As the article showed, a recession in the US manufacturing sector prior to the recent financial meltdown had been concealed by the mis-use of the GDP measure. In the 1970's, 1980's and 1990's objections to the economically and socially harmful neoliberal policies of the Chilean military junta and of Margaret Thatcher were largely blunted at the time by economists misuse of the GDP measure.

All of your figures purported showing real wages growth are almost as meaningless.

When Rhian quoted the ABS statistics for hours of work I was surprised and actually unable to find the data. I thought that ACOSS said that average part time hours of work was closer to 13 hours per week and I thought the newspapers still said that Australian worked more hours per week than other workers in the OECD.

The average full time male wage might be $58000 per annum but the median adult income is $26000. Treasury assumes the incomes under $13000 are subsistence level.
Although ABS says that the workforce participation rate is 67% I am more inclined to believe the OECD statistic for the workforce participation rate for males aged between 15 and 55 as 52%, which is a very low workforce participation rate.

Then we can tackle the problem of CPI. The cost of fresh foods has gone up 10% in 12 months and this is not reflected in the CPI. The only reason that fuel prices have remained static is because the federal election is looming. Rents in my street have gone from $325 to $500 per week this year. Australians have switched their consumption from clothing to communication devices, 10 years ago my phone bill was $70 per quarter, now its $110 per month for phone, internet and mobile.

While governments continue to play games with statistics we are unlikely to tackle the real problems of unemployment and social inclusion.

Divergence
House price rises are a serious problem for first-time buyers who bought homes in the past 4 years, which is a minority of households. Owners who haven’t moved house in recent years, or who traded up, are less stressed by house price rises (and some are substantial winners).

The rental component of the CPI rose by 5.2% in the year to June, but in the longer term has tended to rise by less than inflation.

Some staples’ prices have risen by more than the general CPI, but some have risen by less. The ABS recently analysed growth in the average prices of households’ typical purchases by main income source, and concluded that price rises were pretty similar for all household types, with pensioners experiencing, on average, slightly smaller average price increases than those whose main income source was employment:

http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/productsbyCatalogue/7EC590E06DB36AB8CA25722F001B1050?OpenDocument

So while official inflation doesn’t refect the experience of all households, it’s fairly typical of most.

I usually disagree with what Clive Hamilton (Denniss’s old Australia Institute colleague) says, but he’s spot on in his description of how some on the left refuse to believe anything but bad economic news:

“… social democrats and democratic socialists have a psychological predisposition to believe that the mass of people are suffering from material deprivation. We thrive on the imagined wretchedness of others. When the economy goes bad we feel secretly vindicated, for our reason to condemn the system is renewed. We revel in a collective schadenfreude.

“But we must face up to the facts of today's world. While rooted in historical fact, the left's ''deprivation model" is today the opposite of the truth. The dominant characteristic of contemporary Australia is not deprivation but abundance.

“… In real terms, Australians today are at least three times better off than their parents were after the war, and the distribution of income is about the same. Unpalatable as it is to concede, inequality is not substantially greater than it was 40 years ago. Even if it had worsened somewhat, given the enormous wealth of the great majority it would not matter.”

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2002/05/13/1021002429844.htm

"The ABS recently analysed growth in the average prices of households’ typical purchases by main income source, and concluded that price rises were pretty similar for all household types, with pensioners experiencing, on average, slightly smaller average price increases than those whose main income source was employment:"

That's because baked beans are always on "special".