I think they are still counting (as far as I can figure from the AEC site.. their wording is a bit ambiguous but I am sleep deprived right now). I wonder tho if anyone really wants to be the PM after this election. It's most likely going to be an unworkable situation in parliament and the office of PM may be a poisoned chalice. Shall we have a sweep on what date the next federal election will be held? I seriously doubt any cobbled together government made up of people with such disparate objectives is going to last three years.

Okay so now that it's all been decided I have decided that I just don't give a flying fig about it anymore.
The only thing that sticks in my mind is Peter Garrett and that he was given the education portfolio. Given the right balls up he made with the whole insulation scheme and general Environment job I wonder who thought giving him education was a good idea?? What could possibly go wrong?

Everything.

I just don't get it. A visiting economist from an American University said our stimulus package was the best in the world and saved us from recession. The reason he said, was the speed the money was injected into the community. The government had to contract quickly to large companies as a result of the speed. The complaints about waste were about 3% but Murdoch Press raved about it. The insulation scheme, again done with speed, used contractors who ignored OH&S (a state responsibility.) It is interesting the Libs complaining about this when they see any regulation of business as a constraint of trade. It was right wing de regulation of the banks and Wall Street that caused the Global Financial Crisis in the first place. The irony is lost on the Tory side here and in the US.

Economists will argue until the sun comes up in the west about economics. The OECD thought the Rudd government were splashing money around recklessly and said so. They said that we have nothing much to show for all the money. Let's spend some money building some dams (if the world gets hotter or colder we'll need more water), some tranpsort facilities, some hospitals etc etc and have something to show for it other than some COLAs in schools and burnt houses thanks to the insulation scheme. Most of the insulation came from China and is now sitting in warehouses waiting to be sold online by auction sites. The Aussie insulation batt companies were already at peak capacity before the scheme. The government (including the responsible minister) were told in a report that the scheme was the wrong way to go about it for various reasons and that message was ignored. And the BER? Private schools of all types received funding from the BER and their works cost about 1/2 of the price of govt schools. If the adminstrators who ran the scheme used common sense they could have saved billions which now could have been used for other projects. Let's not forget that the projects came from borrowed money which we will have to pay back.

What saved us was our strong banking system thanks to the two previous governments of both persuasions and the fact we have giant mines selling minerals to China who is still growing. Their growth rate announced in the last couple of weeks was (from memory but don't quote me) over 10%.

I really have to stop posting after a night shift when I don't have the ability to stop blathering on. I remembered today that there was another economist (or more) who thought that all Australia had to do to avoid recession with the GFC was for the Reserve Bank to lower interest rates. This would have freed up money (from lower mortgage costs) which then would have been spent in the economy. Who is right? I have no idea. It seems that there is an economist willing to espouse each and every economic theory there is for every crisis. What's the old joke? Something like "Economists have predicted twenty of the last 4 depressions."

Part of the cause of the GFC was the Clinton government's scheme to get everyone into a home they owned. This law enforced banks to give home loans to people who never normally would have qualified for a home loan. This lead to defaults and the collapse of the property market.This from the Adelaide Advertiser:

"Carter first introduced and Bill Clinton substantially extended what will become known as the notorious Community Re-investment Act. Under the Clinton amendments in 1995, banks were required to extend home loans not just to prosperous neighbourhoods but to the whole community. That is, to extend home loans to the poor who had previously been unable to get home loans because they didn't have any collateral. Nor, by definition, did they have much income to service the loans. Clinton also made two major financial institutions, Fannie May and Freddy Mac, lend more generously to the poor and he reduced their capital adequacy ratios from 10 per cent to 2.5 per cent. That means that, unlike banks, they only had to have enough capital to back 2.5 per cent of all their loans."

Apparently the GWB government knew there was a problem and wanted to fix it. Why they didn't is a mystery to me. I don't know if they couldn't or wouldn't fix it. *shrug* I suppose they were too busy fighting a war here and there. *sigh*