Moody’s have given us a warning, S&P have done the same and lowered out credit rating. Australia is in trouble.

Apparently we’re living beyond our means.

The Coalition. Number one for economic management. Cups of Tea, comfy chairs, and bad art.

Though our government debt is low by global standards, (about 14 percent of GDP), our home debt, (I think this has to do with the housing bubble) is a staggering 160 per cent. Proudly, we are once again world leaders. Apparently, and this has sagely come to light, Australia has been living beyond its means, for years and years and years. Some experts believe that like all bubbles it will go ‘Pop’, and there’ll be tears all round. How could this be?

Well, it seems that in our most recent rush to be rich, we spent and spent like drunken sailors, and gave most of our once in a millennia opportunity away in tax cuts to those very same people who were eye gouging their way to the top of the mortgage and investment market. At the very same time we spent nothing on infrastructure, health care, education, etc, (the national building blocks). At exactly the same time the miners, making squillions, were let off and not asked to pay a penny more than they my have felt entitled to. This is where it gets confusing, the mining bubble had almost run its course by the time the mining tax was muted, an the housing bubble has almost reached it’s peak before a note of caution. And the people in the street who have nothing to do with the money, the mortgages, or the investment boom are being told to pull their belts in, and prepare for rough weather.

Arguably Australia’s ‘second greatest P.M’, admires his legacy.

The people telling us this, are not the messengers, (Standard and Poor’s and Moody’s), who just like to remind us that the democratic process can be bad for business. But the very same people, who blew the bounty, and have done quite well in sabotaging, plundering, stealing, the national social capital in funding cuts to education and healthcare and whatever may be referred to as public wealth. And the pundits all say, (the carbon dating proves it), this slide to a dumb, monocultural, real estate bubble myopia, began with the Howard Government. And this is what I find confusing, because just the other day that party touted the former PM as one of the greatest. The same party that cleverly killed the car industry. How could this be?

I only thought that Howard impoverished us morally and ethically, by allowing Hansonite politics to be mainstream. I applaud him for initiating the impoverishment of our national consciousness, and depletion of our resources, physical, intellectual and material but I had no idea he was a stellar performer in economic melt-down And on top of all that he marched us into Iraq and Afghanistan so that we may anoint those wretched people with our brand of democracy. He also invaded Australia, to let the miserable, wretched first Australians know the measure of his intellectual largesse.

Demonstrating the ” trickle down effect”, under sound economic management, a boon for the ecology.

But there’s more. Since Howard, we’ve thrown aside quaint notions of commonwealth for the neo-con model, and it’s hard to see where the benefits are for ordinary people. But, and this is extraordinary, the real benefits are to those indices that are not yet really appreciated by economists. Just this year, we’ve killed 85 percent of the Great Barrier Reef. We’ve wiped out the kelp beds off the West Australian coast, we’ve decimated the Mangroves on NT and Queensland, and it’s just the beginning.

Having killed off entire ecosystems, the economics for Adani look pretty good. Which just goes to show, there’s always a silver lining, . Unless of course you’re a fragment of biota, an ecosystem, or an ordinary person.