How dare this woman tell us we need a buffer, when we had one, just prior to them taking office.

Thanks for the hard yards Labor, perhaps you lot should forego a large chunk of your pays and planned pensions, after all, it's you lot that have caused the mess.

Why should I pay, I didn't vote for you.

Even if I did, I would be too embarresed to admit it.

How dare this woman...
An interesting beginning to your rant.
Dare I suggest a wee dash of misogyny lurks in there somewhere?
Anthony
http://www.observationpoint.com.au

Don't stress out.They'll be gone soon for a very long time,perhaps for ever.

I went and did a bit of Google searching, in the absence of information in the opening post:

http://www.watoday.com.au/business/federal-budget/more-cuts-will-be-made-if-needed-wong-20120513-1ykfe.html

Right, so it’s THAT sort of buffer (a budgetary surplus type of buffer against hard economic times…. or something like that!)

Well……yes I agree. We need it!

BUT….

It’s got to be part of a total sustainability agenda. We’ve got to balance demand with supply capability across the full gamut of resources and services. There’s no point in trying to balance the budget if the demand is just going to forever increase beyond the capability of our resource base and environment to handle it.

Why does this stuff get left out of the thought processes of most people who debate politics on this forum? It is so VITALLY important!

Labor has not put us in this pickle alone. The other pea in the pod; the Libs have contributed just as much to our terribly antisustainable momentum.

When the whole system is way out of whack, of course the financial situation is going to be thrown off-track. Contortions, half-truths, vote-buying lump-sum-handout stupidity, ever-more debt, etc, etc... that’s what we get when we’ve got no idea about the essential balance between supply and demand.

And the Libs are just the same as the Labs.

Labor is now in a terrible position….which actually puts them in a very good position to EMBRACE SUSTAINABILITY, and give the Australian voters a realistic, and very appealing, alternative! They’ve got nothing to lose and everything to gain if they would only do this.

How dare this woman. This woman is an elected member. This woman should have got Butch's permission before any such comment.
Finance ministers are likely to say things that lean toward the economy from time to time.

Rechtub is half right - we did have a buffer when
Labor came to power.
And then, if memory serves me rightly, we had a global financial crisis in 2008, and the government quite properly used that buffer for the purpose for which it was designed, i.e. to buffer Australins against such crises.
It worked very well.
And now Penny Wong says we need to replace the buffer to be prepared if another crisis comes.
And your problem with that Rechtub would be?
Seems you have selective memory. You remember the last buffer, but not the GFC.
Anthony
http://www.observationpoint.com.au

I find Penny Wong one of the very few shining lights in what is a rather dark and dingy Labor administration, would welcome her into the Greens any day. How could things get even darker and dingyer, I know, vote in the Mad Monk and his band of wombats
I was watching 'sky' the other day and they were interviewing this Arny Schwarzenegger type. Found out he's a Liberal Senator, boy who let him out of his cage. How about it SM please give me the low down on this Arny fella is he also a Rhodes Scholar like the boss? I don't think so, because between the grunts he seemed rather incoherent. What school did he attend, Taronga Park School?

Anthonyve,
The Global Financial Crises is a bit of a misnomer. To have a GFC, as the name implys it has to be globally, world wide, everybody, besides Antarctic (nobody) another continent was not affected, Australia (22 million), so there wasn't any GFC just a partial GFC and that would be a contradiction in terms. Rechtub will most likely point that out to you shortly and give due praise to the Rudd Labor Government for shielding Australians from that non existent GFC the world had in 2008. Please don't hold your breath for that to come. At that time the Conservatives opposed what Labor done. In government the Liberals would have resorted to their old time (non) action, whenever there has been an economic crises, cut cut cut, tighten the belt, help big business, batten down the hatches, bugger the people ride out the storm. The Conservative mantra the world over "The free market will fix everything in time." by nature they believe in non intervention (that's socialism, and the conservatives are ideologically opposed to any form of socialism). Don't worry about people, its money that counts, so millions have to suffer for the good of the few, that's how their God wants it, so they think.

Yeah, Paul, I think you're spot on there.
The Right have this weird notion of putting the economy ahead of people. Yet the economy doesn't actually exist - it's no more than the sum total of millions of decisions made by millions of people interacting.
Yet somehow, they think this non-entity is more important than a living, breathing human.
Makes no sense to me at all.
Cheers,
Anthony

http://www.observationpoint.com.au

To paraphrase the wisdom of Tony Abbott - "Well she just does".

Where has Belly been ? Not a peep from him.
Not hiding his head in shame is he ?

You're right, we did have a GFC back in 08 and although I didn't have a problem with the stimulus at the time, it was the delivery that was the problme, as simply handing out cash makes it too open to waste, which by the way happened to much of the money.

Now putting the GFC aside, what then caused the mulitiude of stuff ups created by labor ever since and, why the need to borrow so much for so long. You lot have said yourselves, we had a buffe and it was used during the GFC.

It's not just federal politics that has been a mess, most states are in poor shape as well , which, for the likes of WA and QLD, given their mining win falls, is a disgrace and proof that labor governments, at all levels are simply incompitent when it comes to spending out taxes.

I thought a surplus was for a rainy day ? How hard does it have to rain before we declare it a 'rainy day' When times are good, we should have a surplus for 'a rainy day'. when we get a world wide deluge akin to biblical proportions, a surplus is obscene.

Pepper, we should be literally printing money at the moment.

If only we went fighting wars, both military and peaceful ones, and looking after so many haner oners, we might be able to.

The truth is, we are going to be taxing our miners just to replace the billions that have been wasted, and that's a crying shame, as these minerals will not last for ever.

Probably a couple of hundred years, and only the expensive stuff will remain. Miners will pay more and more, and so they should. Au manufacturing is being depleted, by mining stealing employees. So fair is fair.
Mining needs slowing down, it's overheating, to many chooks in one shed.
The miners won't care if the place explodes. A total mining economy does not make economic sense. Infrastructure for mining is a narrow benefit for community, and in the billions