It's a situation of weakened media companies, reliant on corporate advertising, not only not scrutinising powerful business interests, but pretty much acting as the cheerleaders for the interests of Australian business opposed to modernization.

The economic "analysis" roughly works in terms of template. This can be seen in the columns of Peter Hartcher in the Fairfax Press. He ends his Seeing sense as end nears thus:

And in the longer run, Australia's public finances will be a problem. As the population ages, we face decades of severe strain and a future akin to Europe's present. It was a happy week for Australia because both sides of politics contemplated having to take responsibility for their decisions.

John Wanna, in his positive review, does put his finger on the key economic point:

Much of Abbott’s economic strategy rests on a spike in consumer and business confidence upon the return of a conservative government. As economic activity picks up, revenues will improve further and restore the budget to balance. This may well eventuate, but it is an assumption — not yet fact. If any government squeezes the economy too hard through spending cuts or tax increases, it risks tipping the economy into recession –

That's misleading as the Coalition's central claim is that austerity will lead to economic growth. Underpinning this is the hypothesis of expansionary fiscal contraction. According to this hypothesis austerity might have expansionary effects in cases where households trust government efforts and think that today’s sacrifices will translate into tax reductions in the future. These expectations on their future disposable income might induce them to increase consumption and investment in the short-term, leading therefore to expansionary effects.

Yet the UK experience of so-called expansionary austerity has been one of stagnation — similar to (but less severe than) the European experience, where limited monetary activism by the ECB has not even come close to offsetting massive unemployment and contraction in the periphery . It is a stagnation that America seems to be beginning to experience in the context of its embrace of expansionary austerity.

The ABC journalists didn't recognize the morality play on offer---a Labor Government had spent too much on frivolous policies, and it had taken on too much debt. It must cut spending and reduce the deficit. The lurid excesses of the past will stop under the responsible Coalition, whilst the pain of the austerity to purge the ghastly excesses of a bad and rotten government is necessary to ensure the return of prosperity. A golden age beckons.

So we can expect more bombast and humbug from a Coalition that reacts against Gillard Labor's reforms, and uses pre-Keynsian economics to support and legitimate its politics of austerity that will impact heavily on the working poor. You can here the traditional talking points of the rhetoric of reaction already: “perversity” (the reform will make the problem even worse), “futility” (the reform will do nothing to solve the problem), and “jeopardy” (the reform will endanger some hard-won social gain).

These are the major polemical postures and maneuvers likely to be engaged in by the Coalition and its corporate allies who are setting out to debunk and roll back “progressive” policies and movements of ideas.

Austerity is the only way to restore prosperity is their claim. The idea of “expansionary austerity,” the proposition that cutting spending would actually lead to higher economic growth, is what sits behind this claim. As the Business Council of Australia constantly reminds us confidence-inspiring policies ( ie., the sustainability of public finances or budget surpluses) will foster and not hamper economic recovery, because confidence is the key factor.

Blyth argues that in the current situation post global financial crisis the accumulation of debt by the public sector throughout the industrial world has far more to do with the direct and indirect effects of financial distress than it does with government profligacy. Indeed, countries such as Ireland and Spain had more favourable records of government debt accumulation than even Germany before the crisis. He makes a strong case that at times such as the present, austerity can actually be self-defeating in that its adverse effects on growth exceed any direct benefits from reduced borrowing.

The history of economic policy shows that governments have experimented with austerity, it has led to disaster, and yet a couple of decades later, their successors try again, with equally dismal consequences. The current lot run a morality tale about the need to reduce government debt by ending entitlements and hacking away at out-of-control government spending. In doing so they avoid the bad behavior of the private sector in the global financial crisis and the way that finance capital made taxpayers liable for banks’ morally hazardous behavior.

It is faulty economics. Free market economic liberals acknowledge that economic crises have happened, but they have thought of them as an inevitable hangover from previous economic exuberance. All that the state could do was balance the budget, and perhaps even raise taxes, to restore economic confidence. Under this theory, austerity was something like allowing the economy to purge itself between successive bouts of overindulgence. The pain is necessary as it is part of an inevitable cleansing process to “purge the rottenness” from the system.

Greece is the poster child

Taking money from tertiary education and giving it to high schools is short sighted. It suggests that the limits of Australia's strategy of decent public services + low taxes has been reached in a a post-GFC world. The days of easy revenue for federal governments is over.

It is also short sighted that Australia’s Renewable Energy Agency – the independent institution charged with giving a kick-start to emerging renewable energy technologies and supporting infrastructure – has had its overall funding cut and deferred. What should have happened is a boosting of its the funds to enable the transition to a cleaner economy--eg., a solar thermal energy power station in Port Augusta.

The budget could have the funds by cutting back on the tax breaks for fossil fuels, subsidies for the big miners and subsidies for irrigation farmers. The programs supporting carbon capture and storage, and coal mining more generally, were slashed. The former were all spin, as they were spruiked by the coal companies in the mid 2000s as they tried to fend off carbon pricing and renewable energy support policies.

Austerity is happening, through a mixture of spending cuts in key areas and tax rises, but not the neo-liberal shift to a smaller state. The neo-liberal goal is to attempt to bypass a democratic government to create an integrated global marketplace for financial and mining interests. It involves using the crisis to further the economic reforms needed to undermine the social welfare model and to create a self-organizing market that would allow for mobile capital flows across Australia's borders.

So an economic crisis in Australia has to be manufactured, which is what most of the commentary in the mainstream press is doing with its attack on the Gillard Government for failing to deliver the budget surplus that it had promised. They promised big on the surplus, they didn’t deliver, they look inept.

The attack centred around an $18bn deficit---the government had a spending problem, not a revenue problem--- is designed to destroy the legitimacy of the Labor government so that it is dumped into the dustbin of history, thereby enabling a more compliant Coalition government to implement the neo-liberal mode of governance more effectively in the form of the politics of austerity.

This is part of the decade-long fierce fight-back by the conservative right, especially in the Anglo-Saxon world against what it sees as environmental socialism.The Coalition's option is to adapt to climate change rather than give in to "socialism" to prevent it.

This, it is claimed, will prevent from Australia becoming an economic basket case like Greece, and this, in turn, will also ease the cost of living pressures on those living in suburbia thereby enabling them to have an easier life. So there will be austerity for the populations to bring national debt under control and a pro-growth strategy based on dig baby dig. This represents the end of rising energy prices and squeezed living standards.

Coal has a brilliant future. The good times are just around the corner. Self-organising markets and business, with minimal public intervention and oversight, are the route to wealth generation, prosperity and jobs.

What happens if China and India start cutting back on their use of coal to generate the energy for their economic development because coal pollution makes their cities unbearable to live in? That would mean them buying less imported coal from Australia. Doesn't that put constraints on the plans of Clive Palmer and Gina Rinehart to construct Australia’s biggest ever coal mines and billions of dollars of associated infrastructure in Queensland around the Galilee Basin?

Wouldn't that mean it becomes more difficult for the coal miners to obtain the finance for their capacity expansion and that their coal assets (eg., coal export terminals, mines and railways in Queensland and NSW). What if the power generators are unable to raise raise capital to build new plants. Doesn't this scenario mean stranded assets?

So you can see the Coalition's gamble. They are betting on China and India's ever increasing demand for Australian coal due to their ever expanding reliance on coal until 2050. Yet the market for coal is not looking good as India and China increase their wind and solar capacity by putting ever more incentives behind solar, wind, gas and nuclear.

What if coal fired power stations are retired and no new coal fired power stations are built? Doesn't that mean a limited rise in the price of coal. Australia would be the hardest hit of any coal exporters because, as the Big Miners tell us, it has the highest marginal cost. What then, is the price per tonne which the coal miners need in order to ensure that their big projects are profitable?

$87/tonne? The price reached $10/tonne in February 2013. It fell to $93/tonne in April. The trajectory is down.

We know that government revenue is declining, and that this means the naive commentary that the deficit is caused by a profligate, wasteful Labor Government blowing the revenue from the mining boom and maxing the credit card is too one sided.

The Coalition continue to deny that Labor's fiscal activism in the form of a fiscal stimulus insulated the Australia economy from the external shock of the global financial crisis that would otherwise have produced a deep domestic recession. The revenue decline will be a condition the Coalition has to deal with, if it gains power, because it is a consequence of the recession in the global economy that is due to the global financial crisis caused by Wall Street.

Secondly, the Howard/Costello Coalition also went on a spending spree---- they actually spent, or gave away as tax cuts, a staggering 94 per cent of the windfall gains delivered by the China-driven mining boom's first phase.

The Coalition is contradictory: they are saying that they will spend big on a family-centred welfare state and to the middle-class, as well as saying that they are committed to the politics of harsh austerity and that the era of ''universal entitlement'' is at an end. They wont reverse all those tax cuts that Howard and Costello gave to the middle class, whilst their direct action plan to achieve the bi-partisan target of a 5 drop in emissions is going to be paid for by taxpayers.

His book continues the culture wars--it promotes climate change denialism, winding back mass university access, funding state-led economic development through the construction of dams, highlights the cultural divide and attacks the impractical, progressive cosmopolitan inner city elites as being out of touch with suburban Australia and favours endless economic growth.

Cater argues that in the first decade of the 21st century, a new “self-appointed ruling class” emerged in Australia, comprising university graduates who were “cosmopolitan and sophisticated”. These powerful inner city elites did not simply feel better off but held that they were better than their fellow Australians. Australia is under threat from the elitism of a "morally snobbish intellectual class". Labor is part of a new social and political elite, a class of tertiary educated progressives who sneeringly look down their noses at ‘ordinary Australians’.

Cater says that this is:

A class that relies for status on cultural rather than financial capital cannot concede that wealth carries virtue, and resorts to attacking Rinehart’s cultural standing in the most personal terms. It amounts to a crude assertion of cultural refinement … (on) how to handle money and how to arrange their hair. In a society where net wealth is considered a poor guide to character, the sneer is an assertion of class superiority … In a country where cultural superiority becomes important, belittlement of others is an underhand form of self-aggrandisement, a habit that once adopted becomes almost impossible to break.

This politics reconfigures the social contract in the name of ending the age of entitlement and returning the budget to surplus. The welfare state is to be dismantled. Essential public services are to be cut so that the rich may pay less tax. The public realm is privatised and the regulations restraining the ultra-wealthy and the companies they control are made light. It makes a virtue of the high levels of inequality in that it says that inequality encourages people to work harder, and the bigger the gap, the more some people will strive to try to close it. It exploits the language of Australian national identity to justify the dismantling of the welfare state.

When it comes to economic/social justice or democratic accountability, the state is presented by neo-liberals as a life-draining bureaucratic monster to be fought at every opportunity. But when it comes to the military, defence, and the punitive, and national security functions of the state, it is cast as the last bastion of civilization and freedom which brooks no qualification or oversight.

Improved productivity is central to rising living standards and sustainable economic growth especially when Australia is repositioning and competing globally as a “high cost” economy. Consequently, living standards will be even more dependent in the future on increasing our rate of productivity growth, particularly in trade-exposed sectors.

Australia has had abundant previous experience of commodity booms, which have all ended badly, with lessons that produced considerable reflection. What Australian policy-makers had to do was reflect on past mistakes The short answer to Green's question is that the jobs and growth will come from building a dynamic and competitive knowledge-based economy.

Clearly, structural change is taking place throughout the world economy, as a consequence mainly of technology and business model innovation and the changing patterns of international trade and development. But it is equally clear that Australia has been so lulled into complacency by the resources boom that we are not taking as much advantage of such change as we could be...Even with the pick-up in productivity growth over the past year, it will be a huge challenge to compensate for terms of trade decline in a high cost economy with a continuing strong dollar.

The Coalition's policy behind the sound bite politics of “Stop the boats, "climate change is crap”, and “axe the tax” is that the job of the federal government is to look after the interests of the big mining industry; an industry deeply hostile to climate change and clean energy policies. This fossil fuel industry would scrap all subsidies for renewable energy and cancel all wind farm developments. Like the state-based coalition governments, Abbott's Coalition remains stuck on the policy that deems that renewables are costly and useless, and don’t reduce emissions, and that the renewable energy target should be killed or neutered.

Their coal dependency position is “coal lock-in” due to high capital costs and long assets life spans. That means Australian citizens will be forced to absorb hundreds of millions of dollars in pollution control upgrades for outdated and obsolete coal power plants.

I am not persuaded. The Coalition was pushed into a corner with no way to walk away and hide from the issue. The disability people got what they wanted: a secure funding source that will partially pay for the NDIS and bipartisan support. That means the Coalition will find it hard to renege at a later date because they are publicly committed to the national disability insurance scheme.

The shrinkage in Labor’s blue-collar base has left it juggling the demands of two irreconcilable constituencies. One comes from the outer suburbs, with a hard-nosed, materialistic attitude to politics. The other is entrenched in the inner city, taking an abstract, classically liberal approach to issues. This duality has left Labor vulnerable to wedge politics, controversies that set one constituency against the other.

This emerges because the structurally changing economy --eg., the steady decline of manufacturing--- means that the aging unskilled blue collar workers becomes increasingly unemployable. We have a coalition of blue-collar workers who feel under threat and middle-class professionals who feel financially insecure shifting to the Coalition. They are shifting because they reckon they have an insufficient stake in the present and future and express a nostalgic desire to halt the changes of recent years, to turn the clock back to an imagined gentler past.

Latham argues that what traditionally holds the two constituencies-the blue-collar base and the liberal inner city, together in an open market economy is nation-changing reform programs. Unfortunately, environmental sustainability is still an inner-city thing, a world away from the aspirational outer suburbs, where the dream is one of 4WDs in the (double) garage, ducted air-conditioning in multistorey dwellings and ostentatious entertainment and home appliances.

This ignores that the aim of the NDIS is to redistribute Australia’s considerable per capita wealth to allow around 400,000 of the most disadvantaged in our community a better shot at earning a living. To help pay for it--- Disability Care---the Gillard government will raise the Medicare levy — currently a 1.5 per cent levy on everyone's income tax — to 2 per cent--- thereby raising an extra $3.3 billion a year in extra federal revenue.

This is good reform and Gillard Labor has shown some political courage on this issue with its proposal to increase the Medicare levy. It indicates that Labor are prepared to risk increasing their unpopularity in the pursuit of a significant and lasting legacy of reform.

Or it will be along the lines of a nasty, arrogant Gillard playing wedge politics and putting politics before policy. It's all political game playing by Gillard etc etc. Better care for those with disability through an insurance scheme is ignored by this kind of rhetoric.

Yet the national disability insurance scheme will both improve the lives of the people it helped and bring into the workforce Australians who were previously unemployable for life---not just the 400,000 disabled Australians, but also their carers and family members.

The Coalition is now prepared to back a modest increase in the Medicare levy to fund the NDIS. It was only yesterday morning that the Coalition was publicly opposing it. They had to shift as their position was untenable , even for them. The Coalition's position was to support the scheme but not the means to pay for it and opposing a levy while simultaneously touting a levy to pay for their paid maternity leave proposal. They blinked and now provide conditional support and so undercut their message of needing to lower the tax burden and limiting the expansion of government.

The core problem is the question of how to fund the remainder of the system. Hal Swerissen at the Conversation says:

The all up cost of the NDIS is currently about A$13.5 billion per annum. The states and the Commonwealth provide around A$6.2 billion at the moment, leaving a shortfall of around A$7 billion.The proposed increase in the Medicare levy raises about A$3.2 billion, to be quarantined in a special fund dedicated to support the NDIS. The rest will need to be found from savings and redirection within the Commonwealth budget.

Jakob Madsen invokes the spectre of Ireland and Greece as a possible future for Australia, if the current deficit spending is maintained.

Jakob Madsen says that it is important to steer the economy back to balanced budgets. His reason is that:

Unless this spending path is broken, Australia could risk an unpleasant speculative attack on its currency at some point in the future. And it risks having little to fall back on if economic conditions substantially worsen. Australia’s budget has been in deficit since the onset of the global financial crisis in 2008. No serious corrective course of action has been taken to reduce it – even though deficits are usually run in recessions, not during an unprecedented mining boom.

If the answer to budget deficits is to cut spending rather than raise tax collections--and that is the position of the austerity merchants--- why not eliminate some of the special concessions for Big Miners (eg., the diesel fuel excise rebate), Big Aluminum (cheap power subsidies), the fossil fuel industry, the handouts to irrigators and the public subsidies for private health insurance?

Secondly, it is the economy growing more strongly over time that is the best way to increase the long-term budget balance. This can be done by upskilling the workforce so that Australians became smarter at what they do and facilitating the shift to a digital economy.

He adds that:

Neoliberalism's victory has depended on the boldness and ambition of global capital, on its confidence that it can now govern not just the economy but the whole of social life. On the back of a revamped liberal political and economic theory, its champions have constructed a vision and a new common sense that have permeated society. Market forces have begun to model institutional life and press deeply into our private lives, as well as dominating political discourse. They have shaped a popular culture that extols celebrity and success and promotes values of private gain and possessive individualism. They have thoroughly undermined the redistributive egalitarian consensus that underpinned the welfare state, with painful consequences for socially vulnerable groups such as women, old people, the young and ethnic minorities.

Debt functions as part of the politics of social class and social control. The political power of business and large financial institutions, plus the momentum of the austerity campaign---too high a "debt-to-GDP ratio" will always, necessarily, lead to economic contraction---- suggests that there will be damage to the economy and human suffering in the near future along with a significant redistribution of wealth upwards rather than downwards.

Australia, it is being argued by the austerity merchants, cannot really afford a welfare state, humane working conditions, pensions, social and economic democracy. The Gillard Labor Government has been on a binge and it will make Australia an economic basket case. Australia must tighten its belt so that it lives within its means. It'll be hard, but it's something the Coalition can and will do for the sake of the grandchildren. "Tighten its belt " means winding back the welfare state.

That's the snake oil the austerity merchants are selling with their recession making economic package. They are using the budget deficit "crisis" as an opportunity to dismantle the social safety net provided by the welfare state.

The greatest single pressure on the budgets comes from growing health spending, which is is eating up more and more of government budgets, both state and federal. The main cause of government health spending is due to people of all ages getting more and more expensive services per person, and there is no reason to think that this trend will slow down in the next ten years without major policy reform.

They ensure the longstanding media traditions of promoting a medical rather than a health policy debate. The federal government’s own Department of Health and Ageing, or DoHA, gives scant recognition to the social determinants of health in a policy area that continues to be dominated by hospitals and the medical lobby to the detriment of primary care.

Since health, for the Coalition, is primarily a matter of personal responsibility and individual choices, we can expect cutbacks to the health budget. Nor can we expect the Coalition to address the problems caused by our fee-for-service based Medicare system. This is a payment system that works for one-off episodic care but is not well designed to promote preventive care or chronic disease management which requires ongoing care across different health sectors.

So we will continue to have a systemic dysfunctionality with prevention or chronic disease and, consequently, a hospital system faced with increasing numbers of avoidable admissions every year.

The current arrangements and policies limits accountability and contributes to growing resources and performance gaps between rich and poor schools, with the disadvantaged students suffering most. CoAG failed to deliver.

The Coalition's position is that Australia's school funding system doesn't need reform and they will retain current inequitable arrangements that reinforce the ever-increasing social and academic divide between schools. The gaps between schools serving the rich and those serving the poor have grown, with the gaps marked by growing differences in school size, student intake, resources and achievement.