What are the big issues that should worry the Prime minister of a smallish country like Australia? No 1 in my view, what is happening with China. The question is will other democratic nations, especially the USA, come to our aid if China decides to punish Australia for its alleged insolence?
No 2 I guess is how the post pandemic economies of the world are going to behave. Massive fiscal and monetary stimuli are likely to cause goods and services inflation and far larger asset inflation. The RBA has washed its hands of Asset inflation, a horrendous action, one I never believed would occur. *
No 3 is probably how will the pandemic work out over the next year or so. Not to mention the scary outbreak of the Covid-19 in Papua New Guinea, and apparent arrival of new and more potent types of the current virus. And tucked away in the PM’s mind will be the question: did the virus emerge from a Chinese laboratory?
No 4 might be apparent global warming, the associated loss of wildlife and the steady increase of pollution of every kind. Not to mention the fact that the global human population is becoming uncomfortably sizeable. Australia still relies on coal power and even an announced new reliance on cleaner gas is unacceptable to local greenies and the greenies of the European nations. ‘Where is your plan?’ demand greenish officials of Europe. Some of them will try to punish Australia despite its meeting emission targets already in place.
If Scott Morrison wasn’t paying most of his waking time on issues like this, and perhaps also some of his sleeping time, he would deserve to be thrown out.
My judgment is that Mr Morrison is a person who has lived a simple life. Married early in life, he has a wife he clearly loves, two hard won girls and his widowed mother. These people are the ‘centre of my life’ he said on one day when criticism was coming hard and fast.
My guess is that Scott Morrison had no idea about the sort of ‘crap’ he has been fronted with. Clearly there have been decades of bad behaviour in Australia’s houses of parliament and sadly the Prime minister now needs to add ‘cleaning up the bad guys’ to his to do list. The opposition needs to stop sledging him as I have no doubt Labor has plenty of bad guys lurking in their offices too.
But there is no doubt that unless Scomo gets serious about cleaning out the bad guys Labor will win the next Federal election. Here is a suggestion that will send shivers down the bad guys spines. Appoint Peta Credlin as the person to fix this problem, with a thorough plan of what needs to be done and how the implementation will be carried out. If Peta does not want this job, I’d propose my wife.
* Today I read in The Economist for 13 March that 'Last month The Reserve Bank of New Zealand was instructed by the government to take account of house prices when setting monetary policy'.
The late Paddy McGuinness always asserted that Australia and New Zealand should combine. Australia could run everything except monetary policy which would be run from New Zealand. Paddy, how right you were.