Posted by Tomte 5 hours ago
The bigger factor is that Australia and NZ have free movement between the countries for those who are a citizen of either.
https://immi.homeaffairs.gov.au/entering-and-leaving-austral...
>… please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.
She's yet another trendy lefty who has now discovered that fucking up your country's economy to "do good" does nobody any good.
From 2019: " New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern criticized the tendency among countries to measure success by economic growth and gross domestic product at the 2019 Goalkeepers event on Wednesday, hosted by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Ardern said that governments should instead focus on the general welfare of citizens and make investments in areas that unlock human potential. She pointed to New Zealand's new well-being budget that seeks to expand mental health services, reduce child poverty and homelessness, promote Indigenous rights, fight climate change, and expand opportunities.
"Economic growth accompanied by worsening social outcomes is not success," Ardern said. "It is failure." "
https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/jacinda-ardern-goal...
This would primarily mean higher wages, lower inflation, and general social well-being.
Arden is indefensible. She increased the size of government, decreased social cohesion via critical theory, housing promises went nowhere. Worse balance sheet, worse outcomes, across the board.
Most of the early economic gain was due to the opening up of Australia in the nineties along with the floating of the dollar.
Dude was a dog whistling neo con, so I never liked him. But what is really telling is that the shitshow that is the current Australian housing crisis was foretold and discussed at length in the late nineties when he introduced the changes to cgt and ng.
He and everyone else knew what would happen even then with these changes. The liberal party thesis, openly discussed, was to prioritise legislation that would promote individualisation in order to break unions and get people to vote against their interests.
Plenty written about the other two you mention. Maybe you should read some of it.
Ok, no one really needed NBN and Howard didn't destroy the housing market completely to name just two lasting legacies of the Howard era. Lets not leave out GST either.
Well, neither of those were true, and gst we got was used to cut taxes to the wealthy and as a bargaining chip to reduce the power of the states. It is inherently regressive, the implementation increases the tax burden on businesses, and it did't even raise enough revenue to allow them to simplify the tax system.
By the late 80s, the wholesale sales tax was creaking at the seams. Toys were taxed at 24% but luxury goods at 0%. Also it was complex and expensive to administer. The wholesales sales tax was awful public policy.
Keating knew the GST was good policy, but lacked the conviction to stand up to “jelleyback” Hawke (Walsh’s characterisation) and his caucus for it. Keating had taken it to the Tax Summit as his preferred policy “Option C”. Lacking meaningful policies of his own, Keating won the 93 election on a platform of opposing the GST and could not engage in reform as a result.
In the aftermath of the 93 election, Howard said never ever to a GST. Then, during government, cabinet and treasury looked at the indirect taxation mess and concluded that the GST was the optimal policy.
They could have done several things at this point. They could have done nothing, and focused on holding onto power, as Keating had done. They could have dressed it up as a VAT. Or they could have just introduced it with their majority. Instead, Howard gave a speech where he plainly recognised that he had said never, and said he had made a mistake, and his conviction was it was the right policy.
He then called an early election, in full knowledge that he was bad in the polls, and made the GST cause the centrepiece of that campaign.
This was the greatest act of political courage and decency of our lifetime. They risked everything on that conviction. Costello then ran a meticulous publicity campaign in which he made not a single mistake to open ground to the rerun of the ALP scare campaign. Against those odds, the Coalition won the election and made the reform, which now has bipartisan support.
But if you think there was a better reform to the indirect tax system available, let’s hear it.
arden is indefensible, but you like pinochet? your barometer for a good right wing government improving the quality of life is an actual dictator who tortured and murdered thousands of people?
and.. fuck pinochet.
Your question was sane and sounded like it was genuine until that. That is an invisible goalpost that can be moved by the question-asker at will to negate any disliked answer, to allow one to create an illusion that no answer exists.
Taiwan. South Korea. Many others. Generally, right-wing governments almost by definition tend to be more free market oriented relative to leftist governments, while leftist governments tend to be more populist. You can get alot of graft and corruption either way, but the path to growth and out of poverty, if you can get there at all, is generally more right-wing, certainly at least for developing economies.
In poor countries, left-wing and right-wing, the rich hoard wealth, and they generally see the competition for wealth as a zero sum game. Leftism tends toward always seeing a zero-sum game, i.e. class struggle over a fixed pie. It's only certain strains of right-leaning governments that figure out you can grow the pie so rich and poor alike become wealthier. (Second-order inequality, i.e. growing wealth gap despite everybody becoming wealthier, is a thornier problem, but relatively recent in historical terms, and I'm not sure the old left/right dichotomy of political economy schools is useful here.)
But relative to historical exemplars, I'm not sure any advanced economy can truly be called leftist, rhetoric notwithstanding. Full throated leftist governments end up like Venezuela. New Zealand is hardly leftist by comparison.
Credit to a few. Roger Douglas in New Zealand. Contemporary Peter Walsh in Australia, the Hawke finance minister, also got it. Keating somewhat got it, and put his neck on the line for politically-difficult but structurally-easy growth-pie macro reforms as treasurer, but did not follow through for the politically-difficult and structurally-hard reforms, like wholesale sales tax, and then became a fixed-pie prime minister. Walsh was gone by then.
This might have been true once, it’s not true now.
Like Ardern, they put pushing their stupid populist views to an ignorant electorate ahead of the harder job of making unpopular decisions to manage a country.
When a populist Prime Minister outrageously states that they don't care about their country's economy, it is obvious what will happen to that economy under their rule.
And it did.
And then she left that country.
Disgusting.