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June 10, 2011
Jack Snelling, the new SA Treasurer, delivered a steady as she goes neo-liberal budget designed to retain the AAA credit rating whilst lauding his right wing credentials about protecting families. He framed the rhetoric of state budget's looking after families in terms of the household budget--limited debt, credit cards, balancing---whilst taking from families by substantially increasing government charges (water charges increase by 40% for instance), getting rid of 400 more public servants and delaying key health and transport infrastructure projects.
It's called debt reduction ---paying off the credit card or mortgage in kitchen table economics --- thereby denying the Keynesian benefits of infrastructure spending when the economy shrinks and there is low population growth. It's neo-liberal economics. Snelling says he's restoring restoring the balance between social compassion and economic frugality, but that he could not provide cost-of-living relief for families because his priority was keeping the AAA rating.
And so the Catholic right continues its embrace of both neo-liberal economics and caring working class values that uses the spin of the human face of capitalism to cover up both the politics of austerity and the ongoing fracturing within the Rann Labor Government. They are pretty divided these days due to the factions and power brokers who have taken over in the party's structure and who are like a cancer in the party.
But the Rann's Government's future is full of hope because BHP's expansion of the Olympic Dam mine (the copper, uranium, silver and gold mine at Roxby Downs) is due next year. Forever hopeful. The mining boom is always just around the corner. This means that it is a "budget for the future of mums and dads who want to raise their families in SA".
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Once upon a time, a long long time ago, in a galaxy far away there was this bloke named Donny Dunstan ....