Media Release – Senator Barnaby Joyce, 5 August 2011:
Mr Swan is a precise reflection on the Labor Party’s total and utter financial incompetence. Mr Swan has carriage over, and a fascination for, a Climate Change modelling section in Treasury. The reality of course is that it has not a prayer of affecting the climate, but until the wave hit he denied the bleeding obvious about Catastrophic Debt Change.
But the Treasurer has done nothing to prepare Australia for the financial fallout on global sovereign debt, which some of us have been screaming about now for years. Yes, I was talking about this even before my brief tenure in Shadow Finance.
Instead, Swan and Labor have overseen the third largest proportional increase in public sector debt in the world. Ken Rogoff from Harvard will confirm this.[1] Iceland, Ireland then us; good on you Wayne you are a genius.
Iron ore, coal and wheat saved us from the first GFC not $900 cheques, ceiling insulation and school halls. Heavy floods in Queensland also brought a severe decline in GDP for Australia recently just to remind us of what happens when coal can not get to port.
We have not heard boo on how this nation invests in where we make our money. It was pathetic that even as recent as yesterday they were talking about borrowing another $100 billion to build a not as fast as a plane passenger train.
Now Wayne what will that help us export to pay for your debt?
[1] Reinhart, C. and Rogoff, K. 2011, ‘A Decade of Debt’, Centre for Economic Policy Research Discussion Paper, p. 12, http://www.voxeu.org/sites/default/files/file/DP8310.pdf
Barnaby Is Right 
Interestingly, despite volatile money market yields & this latest flop in the ‘riskier’ part of the market i.e. the ASX, there’s no significant change in the open market operations of the RBA in the last month or so.
For the time being at least, they are prepared to let the ‘private sector’ money market hang, though of course they are still bidding for government debt. Falling ‘benchmark’ yields with rising spreads is economic depression.
Yes, it is very interesting to watch. Do you recall if the RBA intervened in late 2008 before the AUD hit (approx) 61c to the USD? Or did they only step in to defend at 60c?
Believe it or not, the RBA ‘intervened’ at the start of 2005. They blew the bubble. I can only presume that they are afraid of something, that’s why they are now being ‘prudent’.
Government research agencies have promoted false information for decades: Earth’s heat source is stable, like the SSM (Standard Solar Model) of a Hydrogen-filled Sun
Why? Secret international agreements were apparently made in 1971-72 to use “Anthropologic Global Climate Change” as the “common enemy” to unite nations (Communists and Capitalists; East and West) and avoid the threat of destruction by mutual nuclear annihilation.
The current collapse of Western economies and the USA space program probably stem from those secret agreements [“Climategate, Consensus Science & Economic Crisis”]
Click to access 20110722_Climategate_Roots.pdf
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10640850/20110722_Climategate_Roots.doc
I deeply regret that science, society and economic systems have been so trashed during my life time. I knew that US space scientists were promoting false information, but I could not figure out why until Al Gore and the UN’s IPCC received the Nobel Peace Prize for promoting absolute rubbish as science!
With kind regards,
Oliver K. Manuel
Former NASA Principal
Investigator for Apollo
http://myprofile.cos.com/manuelo09
Yes, and exactly how are they going to power this new high speed (for trains) rail link? Are they going to use diesel (amongst the highest emitters) or will they use electricity? If they choose electricity, will it come from wind farms or coal-fired power stations?
I think we all know the answer to these questions. Perhaps building a bicycle track from Brisbane to Melbourne would be a much more consistent policy
On the debt, I’m pretty sure Wayno understands fiat currency, but maybe someone ought to tell him that just because it is created out of nothing doesn’t mean that we don’t have to pay it back.
I fear the entire mind-set in Treasury/Government is beyond help. Group-think personified. As you say in your final sentence, they do not appear to recognise the reality that the “nothing” must be repaid with interest. We also see this mentality in their insistence on only mentioning Net debt rather than Gross (ie), in doing so, they are implicitly ass-uming that those who owe us money have the capacity and willingness to repay.
Sorry Wayne. Simple common sense dictates that you cannot count your chickens before they are hatched. And the economic reality is, any golden eggs that he may be expecting to come in and thus reduce the Gross debt we owe down to a Net debt number … were probably stomped on some time ago.