Yes! We are allowed to make money while saving the planet.

Monday, January 31, 2011

Why is the New South Wales government selling off the family silver?

The latest in the NSW Government's monster garage sale is public land adjacent to schools, hospitals, transport hubs and anywhere else they reckon they can raise a dollar or two.  The question has to be, why?  It is clearly hard politics for them.  Local protests are happening almost every weekend somewhere in the state, protesting the selling off of taxpayers land, usually to property developers.

The politics may be hard for them but it is not as hard as the alternative - raising taxes or borrowing money.  And that is the reason we have 'The Great Big Sell Off' campaign.  For the last couple of decades the anglo celtic economies (US, UK, Aus and NZ) and one or two others, have been driven by a 'small government/zero debt' fetish.  The logic behind the fetish was that business was more efficient than government in providing services.  Leaving aside that assumption (which I will discuss at a later date), this led to tax cuts and paying down government debt.

The end result is that revenues available to the government have continued to reduce (as a percentage of the size of the economy) yet our demands for improved health, education, aged care and public transport has increased.  The government's attempts to privatise their expenditure through public private partnerships, etc, has not been very successful (that is also for another article) which has left them with similar expenditure levels but with less income.  Answer - sell off the family silver.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]

<< Home