ICONIC public assets could be put up for sale as the Abbott government searches for ways to pay down debt, after warning of a “deteriorating” budget that will force it to raise its $300 billion borrowing limit.
Australia Post and the nation’s air traffic control agency Airservices Australia will join Medibank Private as candidates for sale in a looming commission of audit that will be asked to examine whether major assets need to stay in public hands.
Don’t say you weren’t warned.
The only way to end the practice of politicians alternately running up debts, then selling off everything of value that our nation owns to foreign buyers (thus, controllers), is for the public to insist on government taking control of the nation’s money supply away from bankers.
The following interview is a Must Watch. Fund manager Roger Montgomery explains extremely well why “open for business” really means “the path to serfdom”. A continuation of decades of selling off Australia’s national assets — our in-ground natural resources, and farmland — to pay for our profligate, housing-bubble-centric lifestyles, and our increasing failure to manufacture anything that other nations want to buy.
Otherwise known in our Orwellian world as “sound economic management”:
World famous investor Warren Buffet explained the problem in an even easier-to-understand cartoon format, aptly titled “Thriftville vs Squanderville”:
All the more reason why I find Barnaby Joyce’s recent reticence to keep the heat in his very public fight against excessive foreign “investment” to be disappointing … and suspicious:
NEW Agriculture Minister Barnaby Joyce has muted his outspoken opposition to foreign companies buying up Australian farms, admitting that foreign investment is shaping up as a difficult issue for the Coalition partners to handle…
Mr Joyce conceded yesterday that he had deliberately decided to give the government “some breathing space” by not publicly dissenting on the issue.
In his first address as Agriculture Minister — a speech the famously hot-headed Mr Joyce admitted was his first in which he referred to notes and watched his words — he told cattlemen and farmers gathered in Townsville that they would have to gauge his views based on past comments, and not expect new controversy.
“Judge me by my track record; refer to my recent statements (on foreign investment),” Mr Joyce told the AgForce annual conference in north Queensland.
“My conversation in private is vastly more fervent than what I can say publicly; but I want to give (the issue) room to breathe.”
Mr Joyce denied he had been gagged by Tony Abbott or changed his mind, but said he did not want to make any promises to farmers that he might not be able to keep, now he was a minister.
He also said experience had shown him that good political outcomes were rarely delivered by confrontation.
“In my heart, I still have fervent views and will fight for them behind closed doors; I am not changing my views on anything or dodging the issue (of foreign investment) and people know where I stand,” Mr Joyce said.
“But I am trying to deal with it in such a way that can bring about change; and the reality is that you won’t achieve delivery by backing someone into a corner.”
Has Barnaby been “got at”?
Too early to say, perhaps.
But all things considered, alas, it is beginning to look like it.
If you did not vote for a “radical”, “protectionist”, “populist”, “nationalist” political party at the recent election, then you are partly to blame for our continuing to tread the path to national serfdom.
Because the economic policies of both the LNP, and ALP, represent just that.
"Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers."
Barnaby Is Right 
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