Let’s stop looking to the USA as our economic role model.

I mean, who wants to live in an economy with almost 10%  unemployment and another 10% underemployed.  Where 8% of ‘home’ owners live in trailer parks.  Where over half of personal bankruptcies are caused by medical bills. Where public education is primarily funded by local government so that the best education is in the most expensive suburbs and where the gap between the have-mores and the have-nots gets bigger every year.

None of that is right, so why do we focus so much on their model?    One can understand the coalition, with their Darwinist philosophy of the strong triumphing over the weak, still clinging to the coat tails of Ronald Reagan, but Labor?

What happened to fairness and equality?  For protection of workers rights?  For income redistribution?  For quality social services from cradle to grave?

Instead, two decades of LibLab governments have pushed us closer and closer to the American model.  We have unaffordable housing and run down public health and education forcing people into the profit driven motives of the private sector.  And we have an every widening gap between our  own have-mores and our own have-nots. 

The only area where we score over the USA is in our employment figures, but that has come about from being the ‘lucky country’ where we can just bend down, scoop up a handful of dirt and sell it overseas.  If it wasn’t for our natural resources and our constantly increasing population we would have been in recession for the last decade or more.

Some sanity needs to return to our economic model.  Sadly, both Labor and the coalition seem to prefer the insanity of short term, back pocket politics with no vision and no guts to talk substantive change.