Turnbull and the Keating influence

The more I see, hear and read of Malcolm Turnbull these days, the more inclined I am to believe my informant that the would-be Prime Minister is getting some tactical advice from former Prime Minister Paul Keating. See my political snippet from back in February The new besties – Malcolm Turnbull and Paul Keating where I mentioned that what I’ll call “a normally reliable and well informed Sydney friend” assured me that the pair have developed a close friendship. They are regularly, I was told, in each others company as the Liberal leadership pretender gets a tip or two on playing politics from the former Labor master.
For further evidence, take these comments as recorded by Simon Benson in a thoughtful Daily Telegraph column this morning:
“Labor had committed to several high-profile promises that if delivered would vastly increase outlays over the next decade, with much of their cost conveniently hidden beyond the budget’s four-year forward estimates window.
“Kevin Rudd’s 2010 deal with the states to fund hospitals, Julia Gillard’s 2013 Gonski reforms to schools funding, and the National Disabilities Insurance Scheme (NDIS) are the iconic examples. According to the Parliamentary Budget Office, these three types of spending will have a joint annual cost of $73 billion by 2023-24 (equal to 14 per cent of total budget outlays). If we allow this situation to continue we will put the security of every family and every business at risk. The deficits continue, our debt and interest payments balloon — and all this at historically low interest rates. What happens when rates rise again, as they assuredly will?
“Treasurer Joe Hockey’s 2014-15 budget attempted to address these trends. Evidently by doing so it disappointed many in the community. In addition there was a deeply felt sense in much of the community that our proposed budget measures were unfair to people on lower incomes when taken as a whole. In my view the failure to effectively make the case for budget repair was our biggest misstep, because it was a threshold we never crossed.
“We — and I include myself and every member of the government in this criticism — did not do a good enough job in explaining the scale of the fiscal problem the nation faces, and the urgency of taking corrective action.”
To my mind that’s exactly how the author of the banana republic comment would summarise things.
And for good measure think about the similarity of the views Turnbull and Keating have on the purpose of superannuation. They argue as one on the silliness of allowing first home buyers to raid their super balances to get a deposit.

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