Why Kevin Rudd is SMILING in this world wide recession.

Comrade Rudd and Madame Rein
Australians would be smiling too if they were about to reap a $300million dollar wind fall due to the world wide recession and the policies of Comrade Rudd's Socialist Government.

UK deals windfall for Rein enterprise

Peter Wilson, Europe correspondent
The Australian
March 11, 2009

KEVIN Rudd's family finances are heading in a different direction from those of most people as the global recession helps to add as much as $300 million to the annual turnover of his wife Therese Rein's job-placement company in Britain.

Industry experts familiar with her main operating company predicted yesterday that its turnover would more than treble in the next three years from about pound stg. 60million ($130 million) to pound stg. 200million.

While most families and industries struggle with the recession, Ms Rein, who is estimated to be worth $60 million, is prospering because her firm is already winning new British government contracts and her chosen profession of helping the unemployed is one of the few businesses that continues to boom in bad economic times.

Ms Rein's decision to sell her Australian operations to avoid a conflict of interest after her husband was elected prime minister in 2007 has turned out to be beautifully timed because she concentrated on the British job market just as it was preparing for an explosion of private sector activity.

Her firm, WorkDirections UK, is believed to have doubled its turnover from the pound stg. 32 million it reported in June 2007, while its workforce has also doubled to more than 700.

That growth is mainly being driven by the British Government's injection of new market forces and private enterprise into the task of finding jobs for the unemployed, but the recession is giving her business a further boost.

The upturn in Ms Rein's fortunes comes as Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull stands by his claim that it is hypocritical of Mr Rudd to attack "neo-liberal" policies when his own family finances have benefited from the privatisation of government services.

Ms Rein's acumen and business success have been well documented, but the extent of her expansion in Britain is only now becoming clear.

"Selling up in Australia and turning most of her attention to here (in Britain) turned out to be the smartest thing she could possibly have done," one economic adviser to the British Government said yesterday.

A spokeswoman for Ms Rein's holding company, Ingeus, yesterday refused to comment on the firm's growth prospects, issuing a statement saying that "we are not in a position to speculate about our purchasers' response to current economic conditions (but we) will continue to respond to employment services tenders as they arise".

Labour now pays about pound stg. 1 billion a year to private firms and voluntary groups for job services but it is committed to giving them access to more of the pound stg. 36 billion that it spends on the unemployed each year.

The likelihood of a Conservative election victory next year suggests there will be an even bolder shift to the private sector, with the Tories promising to put many more job-search functions out to contract and to make heavy cuts at the Department for Work and Pensions, which has already lost 30,000 jobs under Labour.

With Britain suffering one of the deepest downturns in the developed world, the number of people on some form of jobless benefits is tipped to double to two million, prompting Gordon Brown's Government to increase the scale and pace of its shift to private-sector job placement.

One of the Government's flagship programs, the Flexible New Deal for the long-term jobless, has been expanded from 100,000 places to 300,000 and the upfront payments to job placement firms have been increased to help fund the start-up of what is essentially a new private industry.

Several experts in London said the next 18 months to two years would be difficult for the private providers as they struggled with their own structural changes and a shortage of job vacancies, but when the recession eventually eased the profits would roll in. When the economy finally began to create more jobs the job placement agencies would thrive because they would have large numbers of relatively skilled and work-ready people on their books.

Richard Johnson, a former executive at Ms Rein's firm in Britain who now heads one of her rivals, yesterday backed the prediction that she could triple her turnover in the next three years.

"If you do the numbers you do come up with a result like that and Therese has built a company that deserves that sort of success," said Mr Johnson, the managing director of welfare-to-work programs for Serco, one of the world's largest providers of privatised public services.

"WorkDirections has probably the best reputation in the country for quality and integrity. It pays its front-line staff more than other providers and something like 90 per cent of them have university degrees.

"That high-quality service is a point of difference in the market and it has been a very clever strategy because the trend now is all about basing payments on results and if you deliver better results you will be better rewarded."

The Government is offering 24 large five-year contracts to provide job services in different parts of Britain and WorkDirections is widely expected to win three or four contracts.

That would lift its turnover to perhaps pound stg. 105 million and similar results in the next two annual rounds of contracts would lift it to about pound stg. 200 million.

Professor Dan Finn, a welfare-to-work expert for the Centre for Economic and Social Inclusion who has studied the introduction of such schemes in Australia and the US, said the first few years of the new British contracts were likely to have generous government funding.

"If you look at cases like the Jobs Network in Australia they tend to spend a lot to make sure it gets up and running, and then they tighten up the funding," he said.

"That is when the number of providers competing for business falls away ... and the quality operations like WorkDirections are left standing."

Ms Rein's firm has also entered the French, German and Swedish job markets but the greatest rewards have been offered by the structural reforms in Britain. Labour has already brought single parents and the disabled into welfare-to-work programs and is now flirting with the more radical step of using the huge pot of money that is normally reserved for unemployment benefits to pay job-placement firms for reducing the benefits bill.

Australian PM Kevin Rudd "...and his hypocrisy. Underline hypocrisy."

Comrade Rudd's great con game

SMH
Paul Sheehan
March 9, 2009

It is going to be fascinating to see how long Kevin Rudd, the greatest illusionist ever to become prime minister of Australia, can maintain this illusion of omnipresent leadership created by his energy, his ubiquity and his hypocrisy. Underline hypocrisy.

Rudd is on course to become the next Gough Whitlam, but Whitlam without the wit. Like Whitlam, he may win a second election before the electorate wakes up. At least Comrade Whitlam was stuck with a claque of criminals in his ministry - Al Grassby, Jim Cairns, Rex Connor - whereas Rudd has no such impediment.

So remember the words, uttered last night, by Rudd on Channel Seven: "Any person's job loss through no fault of their own is a lost job too many when it comes to me. I'm the Prime Minister of the country, the buck stops with me."

Was Rudd able to save a single one of the 2000 manufacturing jobs lost at Pacific Brands last week? No, the buck stopped with the workers. This is the man who increased the immigration program to the largest annual intake in Australia's history, and it is now swelling the ranks of job seekers. This is the man whose Government will, tomorrow, introduce workplace legislation which will increase the power of unions, and give pause to job creators. This is the man who has offered no structural relief to the great job-creating engine of the economy - small business. And this is the man who panicked at the first sign of danger and sprayed the entire $20 billion budget surplus he inherited up against a wall.

If Rudd wants to be Everywhere Man, then let him play the role and bear the consequences. Like most other Western leaders responding to the global financial freeze, he is making it up as he goes along, because we are in uncharted territory. Global industrial output has fallen faster in the past six months than it did at the advent of the Great Depression in 1929-30.

The response of policymakers has been to pump a massive increase in liquidity and government debt obligations into the system. But as the eminent economic historian Professor Niall Ferguson, of Harvard and Oxford, recently warned on his website: "The general assumption seemed to be that practically any kind of government expenditure would be beneficial, provided it was financed by a really big deficit."

Sound familiar? Ferguson continued: "There is something desperate about the way people are clinging to their dog-eared copies of John Maynard Keynes's General Theory. Uneasily aware that their discipline almost entirely failed to anticipate the current crisis, economists seemed to be regressing to macroeconomic childhood, clutching the multiplier like an old teddy bear.

"The harsh reality that is being repressed is this: the Western world is suffering a crisis of excessive indebtedness. Many governments are too highly leveraged, as are many corporations. More importantly, households are groaning under unprecedented debt burdens. Worst of all are the banks. Some of the best-known names in American and European finance have balance sheets 40, 60 or even 100 times the size of their capital …

"The delusion is that a crisis of excess debt can be solved by creating more debt. Yet that is precisely what most governments currently propose to do." Space precludes listing Ferguson's prescriptions but they can be found on his website, and summed up with this sentence: "The solution to the debt crisis is not more debt but less debt."

Tell that to Kevin Keynes. In opposition, Rudd opposed the GST, which in retrospect has been a tremendous stabilising influence in the economy, thanks to John Howard. During the last election, Rudd campaigned as an "economic conservative". Upon winning office, and inheriting a $90 billion financial buffer from outgoing treasurer Peter Costello, he accused the previous government of creating a dangerous inflation threat. It was a fabrication.

After the global financial storm broke, Rudd attacked the excesses of neo-liberal market capitalism even as he spent the entire $20 billion budget surplus he had inherited from the neo-liberals in an absurd attempt to claim he had kept Australia out of recession. The evolution of his economic position has been an opportunistic fraud, exposed by those on his own side of politics.

As the former Labor leader Mark Latham wrote on February 20, in The Australian Financial Review: "When Kevin Rudd lobbied me in October 2004 to become Labor's shadow treasurer, his sales pitch was straight from the neo-liberal playbook. He was enthusiastic about pro-market policies such as deregulation and reducing the size of the state. [As leader] he went to the polls as Howard-lite."

Michael Costa, former Labor treasurer of NSW, dismissed Rudd's recent attack on the excesses of market capitalism, in a critique in The Australian on February 6 as "rambling and selective" and warned that Rudd's response to the global crisis "is likely to do more damage to the economy".

As Niall Ferguson has also warned. When the recession in Australia gets worse, and Rudd's Keynesian cliches have increased the long-term cost of the government intervention, Labor will run a diversionary personal campaign against the Leader of the Opposition, simply because Malcolm Turnbull is a wealthy former merchant banker.

What, you may ask, about the multi-millions the Rudd family has made from neo-liberal policies of the Howard years? Latham had something to say about this, too: "Rudd's wife created an impressive business network and fortune from the Howard government's privatisation of labour market programs."

Rudd can trim his economic sails to pick up whatever political wind he can find because he embodies the hollowness of the pursuit of power before principle.

Alan Jones interviews Paul Sheehan 10 3 09 Americans take note

The Leader of Australia's largest Socialist political party,the Australian Labor Party, ALP, financed by the Marxist based Australian Council of Trade Unions, ACTU,has done very nicely indeed from the policies of the previous conservative Liberal Government of John Howard, he and his wife, Therese Rein (Madame Rudd?) are very wealthy and good luck to them, it was only mid 2008 that the former public servant and his partner were searching for a holiday home and were looking at holiday homes in the vicinity of 10 million dollars, Conservative Capitalist Australia has allowed them to drop the chant of "four legs good two legs bad" and replace it with "four legs good two legs better"

Who can forget Kevin 07's answer to a question during the 2007 election campaign,I believe he asked himself, "I have never been a socialist" clearly he and his wife reject totally the platform of the political party he is now the leader of.

I have never seen an Australian Labor Party leader or politician or their bankers in the ACTU, LIVE the ideology they demand be imposed upon those they despise so much,the Australian people, Mr Rudd and Madame Rudd are doing nothing any different than every other Socialist here and through out the world are doing have done and will continue to do, it's "do as I say not as I do"