Australia wants more than the Lucky Country can deliver

This week, The Australian Financial Review’s economics editor, John Kehoe, showed in one chart why Australia’s spending habit is so hard to break. Since 2000, successive mining and energy booms have given Australia the greatest surges in terms of trade of any comparable nation in recent times. The prices Australia gets for its exports increased over the prices it pays for imports by 149 per cent in the period, which by this year has lifted tax receipts by something like an extra $100 billion annually.

The opposite of Paul Keating’s 1986 banana republic has funded the badly focused spendathons of the Howard government’s middle-class family payments welfare, Labor’s runaway NDIS, and Scott Morrison’s GST bribe to the states.