A world utterly changed
THIS week should see the end of the tired old economic cliches about there being “no money tree”, or “no such thing as free money” or, as the late tightwad Calvinist economic philosopher and do-nothing Australian prime minister Malcolm Fraser used to insist, “There is no such thing as a free lunch ”.
Had Malcolm not been such a wet blanket and an absolute humourless bore, he would have been invited to some great free lunches thrown by the likes of“Bondy” and“Skasie”.
He would have been in great company and he might even have learnt to enjoy himself without losing his trousers.
Economics is rightly known as the“Dismal Science ”.
Think of the dreary strictures of Paul Keating, who dressed like an undertake rand buried us with 18 per cent interest rates and the “recession wehadtohave”.
Economics offers very few moments of fun and then always at the expense of the ordinarypeople.
Think of Joe Hockey and Matty Cormann back in 2014 caught on camera in a prebudget celebration, smoking fat cigars as they planned to cut family benefits and raise petrol excise. No wonder we love to hate treasurers.
But now all that has changed.
If I might meddle slightly with Shakespeare’s Richard theThird…
“Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son of(Kooyong ).
“And all the clouds that lour’ d upon our house
“In the deep bosom of the (Keynes ian) ocean buried .”
Or, moving on, as the editorial in the New York Sun on September 21, 1897, once famouslyputit:
“Yes, Virginia, there is a SantaClause.”
There is indeed, kiddies, and his name is Josh Frydenberg. He has just had a dramatic road to the Reserve Bank conversion. Not since Saul of Tarsus, on the road to Damascus, changed his mind about beating up the Christians, has there been such a gigantic changeoffaith.
If you fell asleep during Tuesday night’s budget speech you woke up Wednesday morning to a world changed utterly.
There are times in history when this happens, but not everyday.
This month 994 years ago the British woke on October 15, 1066, to the alarming realisation that they were now Norman French after King Harold’ s defeat at Hastings.
It must have seemed worse than a plague and the AngloSax ons were unhappy with the regime change, which was accompanied by the usual murder and pillage. But in the end, paraphrasing history, it was all for the better.
The Dark Ages were now officially over. The Brits cleaned up their act and adopted table manners. They stopped eating with their hands and learnt to use knives and forks. Food got more interesting and wine was added.
Most important, they got a better language; Latinate English was so much more poetic than vulgar Saxon.
They also got mighty castles with moats and drawbridges and incalculable future tourism potential.
Recent world history is dotted with nod al moments when an event changes our world forever, sometimes for the better.
In most cases it’s just a matter of looking on the bright side while remembering that every silver lining has a cloud.
But now a world changer has happened right here at home. And I think it has to be an unqualified winner, at least of votes, at the next election.
There is a money tree. It grows in the garden of the Reserve Bank of Australia and the new monetary policy is that ScoMo and his Treasurer can climb over the wall, pick as much moolah as they want and spend it as quickly as they can.
Having forever been the party of dreary fiscal restraint, the Liberals are now happily heading for a trillion-dollar debt. (I think that’s 12 zeros).
The Treasurer might know for sure.
Australia is blazing an economic path that all Western nations might soon follow. They all have much higher debt levels than us, so rather than beating themselves up better they should enjoy it as a virtue. As we are about tod o. We should be proud that after a miserable economic heritage of doom, gloom and parsimony we are going to let our mullets down and eat, drink and bemerry. Whynot?
In China they have been printing money like it’s been going out of style for years now. They have successfully used it to grow their economy, build armies and navies, and
buy large parts of our country. Keynesian economics or so called “deficit spending” has done China no apparent harm and has raised millions out of poverty — though not into freedom.
It would be a brave economic nark in China who said: “Hang on a minute, there’s no such thing as a money tree .”
Likewise, in Australia we can only laugh when Labor argues for fiscal responsibility. It makes Albo look like Dracula joining the Jehovah’s Witnesses and campaigning against blood transfusions.
In the new paradigm, money has no intrinsic value. It is just a means to an end.
I talked to my friends at the RBA this week. As always, economists are obscurantists, but as far as I was able to tell it costs about 7 cents to make a plastic five-dollar note and about 17 cents to make a one hundred dollar note.
The difference for the big bucks is a few added bells and whistles to frustrate counterfeiters.
My RBA friends would not tell me what the protective measures on the big notes were. “For security reasons,” they told me.
So, as you might have gathered, I don’t know everything about the Dismal Science.
But I do know our financial bosses don’t need to worry about forgers.
Between them, the Reserve Bank and the government are the biggest counterfeiters in Australia.
And with real money so cheap, who would bother wasting precious time making forgeries?
On a sad note, we lost one of Tasmania’s greatest modern artists this week with the death of painter Geoff Dyer.
Certainly Dyer will live on through his work, but for those who loved him, and there were so many of us, that won’t be enough.
Even more than the painter wewillmisstheman. Immensely and forever. Until the doctors and intimations of mortality intervened, he was not a man of moderation.
A bottom less glass of shiraz, a cigarette that never extinguished and a gravel voice which may have been a consequence of both—his conversation held the bar and the tablespellbound.
A night with Dyer was unforgettably funny and sometimes punishing.
Yet the next morning he was back in the studio wrestling with his art.
Until he painted my portrait I didn’t comprehend the ferocity of the process. It is clearly there in the work, but it was also part of the process.
An old footballer and a boxer, Dyer tackled and attacked his canvas. It was not a gentlebusiness.
I admitted to being a bit intimidated on the battlefield of his North Hobart studio while he threw punches and angry curses as well as paint.
It was all or nothing, and by the end of a session he was clearly exhausted but never beaten.
“Mate, I’ m only an old landscape artist in, let’s face it, late middle age but I’m still in the game ,” he would tell me.
“I’m in the last quarter and kick in’ into the wind.
“But mate, I tell you what, I’m still kickin’ a few goals.”
And he did, right up until the final siren.
LIKEWISE, IN AUSTRALIA WE CAN ONLY LAUGH WHEN LABOR ARGUES FOR FISCAL RESPONSIBILITY. IT MAKES ALBO LOOK LIKE DRACULA JOINING THE JEHOVAH’S WITNESSES AND CAMPAIGNING AGAINST BLOOD TRANSFUSIONS.