Stop complaining

RBA Chief tells Australian homeowners to stop complaining, they’ve actually got it ‘pretty good’ ….

Reserve Bank boss Philip Lowe, the man who has inflicted 9 straight interest rate rises on Australian homeowners, said last week that Australians actually have it “pretty good” and should stop ‘complaining’.

Dr Lowe, who apparently lives in a $4 million house and earns over $1 million a year, told the media that ‘nothing keeps him up at night’.

In fact, his only real ‘worry’, is the growing “retreat from globalisation and free trade”, which he claims made Australia “a wealthy and prosperous country”.

It is a complete mystery to me how any economist, let alone one as eminent as Dr Lowe, can seriously think that offshoring a population’s productive capacities and skills base can possibly maintain a country’s prosperity for long.

In fact, it was globalisation which systematically dismantled all the elements needed for a free and prosperous economy in Australia.

The move offshore of production resulted in the moving offshore of our GDP, tax base, consumer income and irreplaceable career opportunities for young Australians.

The ladders of upward mobility that once made Australia an “opportunity society”, were kicked away in the interest of higher corporate profits.

Without growth in consumer incomes to drive the economy, the RBA substituted it with consumer debt.

This allowed Australians with stagnant or declining incomes to access more and more spending monies on credit, creating the illusion of growth.

The massive expansion of debt tied heavily to the property bubble is now coming to an end.

The ‘New Economy’ jobs we were promised, turned out to be insecure, casual jobs in non-tradeable services such as retail, travel, waitresses, bartenders, aged care and hospital workers.

Today, a thin layer of very rich people in Australia rule over those “who have been left behind”—a shrinking middle class and a growing underclass.

Australia’s median family income hasn’t increased for a quarter of a century, while real wages have gone backwards.

Many businesses now only survive well enough to service their debts, with most too broke to expand or raise productivity.

Even the good ones are so burdened with debt, they are in no position to invest further.

Offshoring jobs may have benefitted bankers, corporate executives and their shareholders, but it ruined the income and employment prospects of a whole generation of Australians.

The legacy today is a trillion dollar debt burden and a population facing the biggest decline in its living standards since World War 2.