Piers Akerman
News.com.au
Saturday, March 21, 2009
PRIME Minister Kevin Rudd will be in his favourite place this week - that is, a long way from Australia.
In jetting off - again - he brings tomind the old joke that was told about former governor general and former foreign affairs minister Bill Hayden, and former prime ministers Paul Keating and Bob Hawke. In the routine, the three men were asked about their favourite sounds.
Hawke said it was an MCG-sized crowd cheering him, Keating said it was one of Mahler’s symphonies - and Hayden said it was the tinkling of ice as the drinks trolley rolled down the first-class aisle on a Qantas jet taking off for Europe.
The current Prime Minister could easily be substituted for Hayden, so long as no one mentioned alcopops.
Rudd leaves an Australia that, solely because of his Labor government’s policies, is going to suffer unnecessarily more grief in the current global fiscal stuff-up.
Australia had minimal exposure to the lunatic sub-prime mortgages that were introduced into the US as a sop to left-wing legislators from the Democratic Party, the Australian economy was in surplus when Rudd and his team of economic nincompoops came to office, Australia had a cushion in place that could have softened the reduction in international markets.
But Rudd and his neophyte economics team nominally headed by Treasurer Wayne Swan, but really run by Treasury head Ken Henry who has succumbed to the siren song of political power, have pulled all the wrong reins.
They talked down the economy when they should have been talking it up - but they were determined to attempt to smear the Howard-Costello team’s outstanding legacy in the process.
Inflation was the killer, they insisted.
It wasn’t. They were.
Now, as Kevin 747’s aircraft pumps out more carbon dioxide (thank goodness CO2 is good for the planet and essential for plant life and not the poisonous polluter Kevin claims it to be), his new IR legislation and his planned greenhouse bill will choke off Australian jobs.
But, as the advertisements used to say, there is more - however, in this case it’s not a nice set of steak knives. Rudd and his cohort have so depleted the nation’s savings that the federal Government is now planning to axe a central part of Labor’s health policy: the universality ofthe Medicare safety net.
Introduced by the Whitlam Labor government in 1973, the safety net has always enjoyed bipartisan support - until the arrival of the Rudd vandals in Canberra.
Rudd and his horde now wish to break that compact, despite a specific election promise backed by a flood of media statements he and current Health Minister Nicola Roxon both issued. In what will be one of the most disastrous attacks on the Australian families Rudd claims to champion, he will redefine who is rich and who is poor by introducing a form of means test at a time when household wealth is extremely transitory.
Families who save will be caught up in a pincer movement. If they safeguard their earnings to give themselves the security they desire in order to have children, they will find themselves too wealthy to benefit from Medicare.
Yet, when one member of the family stops working to stay home with their new children, their income will drop just at a time when they need to meet extra costs.
The chronically ill will be hit and unable to meet the cost of specialist care; the elderly will find themselves unable to get specialist care when it is needed, because of the lengthening waiting lists, and the younger people wanting to have families will find themselves excluded because both husband and wife work.
Under Rudd’s plan, hard-working couples would be denied the safety net because they’re too wealthy, but be able to access it once they’ve paid up - because they would then be poor.
It doesn’t make sense, any more than it does slugging self-funded retirees and removing them from self-sufficiency.
Particularly hit will be those families seeking to use IVF. This is no small percentage now. On the percentages, one child in every Sydney classroom is now the product of IVF treatment, which is responsible for the birth of 11,000 children a year.
When asked last week about his plans for cancer patients and young couples on IVF treatment, Rudd retreated into the meaningless gibberish he now resorts to whenever he is challenged in Parliamentary Question Time.
The closest the Rudd government has come to acknowledging its devious plan to dump the Medicare safety net came in the Senate when Queensland Labor Senator Joe Ludwig admitted that the National Health and Hospitals Reform Commission “will do more work on the safety net’’.
Labor is committed to destroying jobs during the current economic downturn, now it has revealed that the health safety net is no longer sacrosanct.
Parliament is now on holiday until the May Budget session but there are many serious questions that need answering.
Jobs, health, and the lack of a strategic plan in Afghanistan where 10 Australian soldiers have now been killed in the war Kevin Rudd wanted to fight, as opposed to the Iraq conflict, which he wanted to run from and leave our allies in the lurch.
Watch our Prime Minister duck the hard issues during his press conferences over the next six weeks.
It’s not personal, it’s just politics, but the only sound Kevin wants to hear is the ice rattling on the drinks trolley on his own jet.
