This is New Canberra, a cashed-up boom town of boutique hotels, gourmet restaurants, passionfruit martinis and funghi pizza. Jamie Oliver is opening a restaurant soon.
Sydney might be in the doldrums, with shuttered shops and sky-high costs, where even law firms are laying off, and taxi drivers say business has never been so slow. But in Canberra it’s clover. This is Wayne’s world, a town of politicians and wall-to-wall public servants in protected jobs, untroubled by market disciplines and insulated from the wealth creators who fund it all.
This is where the government’s promises and wacky policies make sense, where big government is a growth industry that fuels the economy.
It’s where borrowing to fund an unsustainable lifestyle is a rational response to a drop in income. Wayne’s world is where the chickens never come home to roost.
Speaking in Parliament House yesterday, however, Swan posed as a man taking his medicine, as he announced an $18 billion deficit and made excuses for why the overly optimistic revenue stream he predicted had collapsed.
In the real world, revenue has increased by $70 billion since Labor took office.
The problem is that spending has ballooned by 35 per cent.
Almost 80 cents in every dollar of income tax goes to social welfare.
All those bloated bureaucracies in Canberra keep soaking up the taxpayer dollars to pay for coffee machines and organic sourdough.
But in Wayne’s world, despite his lucky leather bracelet, Swan is Australia’s unluckiest Treasurer, victim of a “stubbornly” high dollar, a fall in the terms of trade, a GFC hangover, the European economy, and “glass half-full” journalists.
Swan’s real legacy as Treasurer is six budget deficits, a botched mining tax that cost Kevin Rudd his job and brought a fraction of the revenue promised, a carbon tax which is equally fruitless, an undelivered surplus and excessive spending.
It’s money which, true to form, Swan and Gillard want to spend into the never never, well into the second term of the next government.
