For the first time in about a decade, the Australian economy is in recession. This is bad because the only thing either side of government really values is the big line that is supposed to keep going up, but now it’s going down. We have to wonder what they’ll try doing to fix it, and how bad their fix will be. To most of us it is no surprise, because Australia does three things with its economy:
- Sell iron ore to foreigners
- Sell education to foreigners
- Sell houses to foreigners
Obviously if you cut the buyers out of the equation there isn’t going to be a lot of economic activity going on. It is well-established that the only thing which kept us from drowning in 2008 was foreign buying of our land, and the crazy immigration rate – people were flooding into the country at the highest rates ever, and had been for about 10 years at that point, and they came in expecting a nice comfortable house in a peaceful suburb with a good job in a stable Western country. So they took on the mortgage debt, which pumped up the GDP and made the big line go up. They took out some loans, maybe leased some cars, and pumped up the big line again. 2008 was hard, but Australia is held up as the exception where things weren’t so bad.
The one thing that could’ve upset the Australian economic ponzi scheme was if the outside world were somehow shut out. But in the age of globalism that seemed very unlikely, so all the politicians ignored the threat. Then 2019 ended with the greatest media hype blitz since 2016 and every country on Earth got shut down over the Coronavirus. Suddenly all our buyers disappeared.
This article from some lefty rag has a lot of charts and is worth a look if you’re interested in that sort of stuff. One of the charts worth looking at is the GDP per capita – that’s your personal share of economic growth. Unfortunately the graph only goes back to 2006, it would be much more useful to see it back into the 1980s or even 1950s. But what it shows is that despite all the promises governments over the last two decades have made you, none of them have come through.
None of the amazing schemes to get more Aussies working have paid off.
None of the promises of immigration boosting the economy ever came through.
None of the power of globalisation ever found its way to your pocket.
The way Australia has been run in the last 20 years, but pretty much since the end of World War II, has been totally wrong. Take a look at the reasons why Australia federated, and look at the sort of Prime Ministers we had from 1901 to 1945. They came from the Protectionist party, the old tradition of the Labor party, and the Nationalist party. The very first things we did as a country were to protect our own industries and jobs. We got through two world wars, the Great Depression, and a whole lot more. Difficult, world changing events, and hard times, but we made it out and were able to get back to normal.
Take a look at a list of prime ministers from WWII onward. It’s just a boring back and forth between Labor and Liberal. They have been promising more or less the same thing ever since Menzies and Whitlam, and nothing has been delivered except hardship and disappointment. The churn of leadership is indicative that something is very wrong with our political parties and we need a new solution. But now everyone is diverse and can’t agree on anything! Good luck electing a new party under these conditions. Will this recession change anything at all?
The graphs on the Guardian article show that we never really recovered from what happened in 2008. Sure, the GDP has been solid, but your share of it is what has been taking the hit. We have lost our primary buyers, i.e. foreigners, and so the government has to find a way to rebuild Australia’s economy. Of course, using this opportunity to bring back industry and manufacturing is not an option for them. Holden is gone forever, so instead we get the Home Builder program. It’s a $25k grant if you spend $150k or more on building or renovating. Now just what do you think the government is planning to do once the borders open back up?
The events of the last year have put a big question to the policies of globalism, immigration, and selling out Australia. Labor and Liberal are not offering anything new. They want things to go back to the old lockstep system they’ve been running for over half a century. They want the borders to open back up so they can sell more houses to immigrants. They want the universities packed full of gullible hopefuls so they can ratchet up the education debt. They want you either building houses, pulling ore out of the ground, or sitting in an office doing paperwork. How dull and boring our world has become. Will you accept that?
