Very sad, really. It's not that bad in California, yet. Even this state has a lot problems, unless you are millionaire CA is not a good place to live.
Opinion The biggest political lie no one will admit at this election Amid the deluge of claimed political porkies, neither Anthony Albanese nor Peter Dutton is prepared to tell the truth about how to revive living standards. Michael Stutchbury Editor-at-large Apr 22, 2025 “Australia, we have a liar in the Lodge,” declared deputy Liberal leader Sussan Ley in her warm-up to Peter Dutton at the party’s election campaign launch. Evidently, an opposition leader can brand the prime minister, in this case Anthony Albanese, a “liar”. Labor can go on and on about Dutton’s “lies”. Yet amid the alliteration of political porkies, neither side wants to canvas its role in Australia’s cost-of-living squeeze. And they won’t fess up to the fix. Peter Dutton offers “aspirational” hopes to index the personal index scales for inflation, yet promises a tax rebate that would erode work incentives and the fiscal bottom line. James Brickwood The Coalition’s liar in the Lodge drumbeat ratcheted up in early 2024 after Albanese broke his election promise not to tinker with its aspirational stage three tax cuts. Such a charge would have been notorious once, like in 1971 when The Australian’s Alan Ramsay called out “you liar” from the old Parliament House press gallery to John Gorton on the floor of the house below. A quick abject apology to the PM averted the journalist’s arrest by the sergeant-at-arms. Language still ruled unsayable in parliament is now normalised outside it – and protected from defamation lawsuits by the High Court’s implied freedom of political speech. If politicians are telling more deliberate falsehoods, could calling a spade a spade be a refreshing repudiation of the bourgeois fetish for “my word is my bond” respectability? Truth is relative, right? Yet, in a world of social media influencers, fake news, Donald Trump and cultural tribalism, it’s more about assassinating political opponents’ character than the merits of their arguments. Julia Gillard was branded a “Juliar” witch after arguably breaking her 2010 election pledge that there would be no carbon tax under any government she led. Labor returned fire on Scott Morrison, whom Jim Chalmers called a “pathological liar”. It used question time to read out leaked Barnaby Joyce texts that called the PM a “hypocrite and a liar” before being cut off by the speaker for using unparliamentary language. Now the Liberal and National campaign puts out an overblown “Albanese live lie tracker” with all-caps headlines such as “56 LIES IN 21 DAYS”. On the other side, Chalmers provided a brief monologue for the evening television news just before joining Australia’s financial regulators to discuss the April 2 Trump tariff madness. “It was Liberal Treasurer Josh Frydenberg who agreed to pump up overall demand during the pandemic with unprecedented slabs of borrowed money.” The message was dominated by “Peter Dutton’s lies”: “Peter Dutton has told a series of egregious lies”; “Peter Dutton’s lies about the budget and the economy are bordering on pathological”; “most egregiously is he lied last night, and he lied again today”; “Peter Dutton has lied about that once again”; and, “he’s been lying in egregious ways”. All this 24/7 news cycle talk devalues the currency of political perjury, confuses voters about who is telling the truth, frustrates centre-ground policy compromise and weakens trust in democracy. Albanese did fall off the back of the stage. Chalmers’ claim to have “almost halved” the budget deficit is misleading at best. Many in Labor do want to wind back negative gearing for housing investors, but so did Morrison. Dutton has backed a Medicare co-payment. But so did Bob Hawke’s left-wing Health Minister Brian Howe. And Dutton offers “aspirational” hopes to index the personal index scales for inflation while promising a tax rebate that would erode work incentives and the fiscal bottom line. At least he concedes the need for structural tax reform. Behind all the normalised political insults sits the big fat lie of the 2025 cost-of-living election. As Treasury secretary Steven Kennedy says, it was Liberal Treasurer Josh Frydenberg who agreed to pump up overall demand during the pandemic with unprecedented slabs of borrowed money. Egged on by Chalmers, it was a deliberate, opportunistic strategy to cut the jobless rate to 50-year lows. But the excess demand behind what Kennedy celebrates as full employment spilled over the economy’s disrupted supply lines to generate the highest price inflation in three decades, smashing Labor’s 2022 promises to boost living standards. In effect, the costs of the pandemic shutdowns were spread widely rather than concentrated in unemployment for 10 per cent or so of voters. But the fairer economic result has not been popular. Reserve Bank governor Philip Lowe became the fall guy. As his successor Michele Bullock notes, there is no constituency for the unemployed who never appeared. As a commodity-producing and energy-exporting economy, Australia got the extra cushion of an export and tax revenue boom from the Ukraine war, which produced Chalmers’ two temporary budget surpluses along with more inflation, higher interest rates and a structurally bigger government. “Albanese insists that Australia’s high-cost economy can readily sustain further regulated wage increases even while it is becoming less productive.” With both sides swapping insults, they now both pretend to provide costless cost-of-living relief while putting voters deeper into debt. They won’t say that Australia’s resources wealth has underwritten a complacent entitlement culture that Labor feeds and that the Coalition is too timid or powerless to resist. They won’t admit that unpopular budget spending cuts will be needed to wind back the projected decade of deficits. Nor that defending Australia from China and Russia means that baked-in expectations of more universal social services can’t be met. Nor that genuine tax reform – including a shift from income to consumption along with a lower company rate – is needed to reduce the tax system’s drag on economic growth. They won’t admit that the costs of decarbonising a fossil fuel economy will inevitably show up in energy bills. Albanese insists that Australia’s high-cost economy can readily sustain further regulated wage increases even while it is becoming less productive. The Coalition has done little to suggest otherwise. Is there a bigger political lie than all this?
Its the same everywhere in the West. Voting is a waste of time until an economic collapse comes. Then the progressives will come or even worse a French Revolution like Reign of Terror will come.
Bloomberg has a few interesting articles and a podcast on the housing crunch and upcoming election. The podcast interviewing experts sounded like Vancouver’s or Toronto’s housing struggles in their popular cities.
‘Liar, liar’: PM, Dutton in bitter row over campaign truths in third debate Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton have engaged in a tense exchange over claims of lying and abuse, with the PM describing his rival as desperate and the Opposition Leader accusing his opponent of not being able to ‘lie straight in bed’.