In my own area, one that comes to mind is an increase in postgraduate scholarships and ARC grant funding (obviously, I have a direct interest in such).

Bloody hell, everyone’s looking for a handout now! The inconvenient truth for lefty, do-gooder academics is your funding came directly from the resources boom, and that funding has all but evaporated.

As I have pointed out many times here, no one gave a damn about the non-resources export sector as the dollar soared past 98c. We sure as hell weren’t offered any bailouts of the likes Kev is now giving to construction, car manufacturing etc.

When you allow your economy to become little more than quarry, you have nothing to offer the world when the commodities cycle turns sour. Combined with staggering levels of private debt and a chronic current account deficit, Australia is headed for banana republic territory.

Have no illusions people, we are headed for a monster budget deficit as the demands for handouts grow ever larger, and government revenue shrinks. Expect the Future Fund to be well and truly raided by the time this little “downturn” is over.

As to the question of why NSW is a basketcase: Perhaps if we weren’t sending our GST dollars north of the border we might do a little better! The clowns in Macquarie St don’t help either.

As far as I can see, we’re going to hit a serious downturn anyway you skin it, and there’s no amount of immediate stimulus to any sector of the economy that’s going to stop that, because we can’t live on consumer spending alone. So it’s time to buffer the most vulnerable from the deprivations on the way, and invest in long-term renewal of our infrastructure, tackling key climate change points along the way.

And what’s not to like about the vision of all our major cities with Paris or Tokyo – level public transport systems of efficiency, elegance and cleverness?

For bigger projects to help out all the workers getting laid off in the west, any very fast train / rail freight routes still needed could be looked at.

Personally it just makes me want to cry thinking about the $10.4 billion spent on trying to get people to buy more christmas presents, not least because the most disadvantaged as usual got nothing (unemployed and students) or less (carers) than farking ‘working families’. Thank god most of them didn’t listen and sensibly paid down debt. But think what more stimulus that money could be providing right now, for eg, to the panicking building sector if it had been offered instead as payments to insulate houses, put in energy efficient / solar hot water / water efficient devices. Would have lowered bills, created plenty of temporary relatively unskilled jobs (eg insulation installation) and had long-term benefits to the most disadvantaged.

Or how about create community gardens and farmers markets to help people access cheap and healthy food & support the rural sector. Or, or…. $10.4 billion would have bought an awful lot of real lasting good and longer lasting stimulus than the lump sums, poorly targeted, did.

I can only hope that most of the population at some point experienced the same nauseating cognitave dissonance I did listening to Mr Razor Gang urging people to spend spend spend. Can we get off this joke of a pyramid scheme now please?

One of the reasons I have more faith in Obama than in many other politicians (and I hope not to be too disappointed) is that he seems to be someone genuinely prepared to listen to a diversity of advice and then reach independent judgements about the right way to proceed. I just can’t see him lurching from one desparate move to another. I think we are very lucky that it is he, rather than McCain taking the reins in the US….

Really good,insightful posts. As for “KR obviously doesn’t know much about economics” I agree and neither does Swan but for me that’s a strength Little knowledge being dangerous etc.

Much prefer that Ministers listen to advice from up-to-date professionals rather than rely on ‘knowledge’ that is completely out-of-date.

Let me give you a little example:

Even if you had a really valuable public infrastructure project to start early last year, unemployment was so low and the economy so hot in WA and QLD that it would have been pointless and wasteful to compete with the private sector for those resources.

However, this year the opposite is true. It is called resource levelling, and gets taught at undergraduate level in most engineering courses. If you have a copy of Microsoft Project, you can fiddle with it yourself without the need for an engineering degree. Not a hard concept for a Government to be able to grasp.

Governments ought to be able to do just a little planning so that their projects are slotted in with private sector activity.

It is the Howard Govt’s apparent inability to work out that you actually need to schedule projects as the resources are available rather than when the electoral cycle says you should throw money at stuff that demonstrated to me its quite average economic management credentials.