On the election by Latham

This is an X post, reported by Geoff Wilson and attributed to Mark Latham.

https://x.com/GeoffWilsonWAM/status/1921739159733154024

I can’t disagree with any of it. Perhaps Latham understates it a bit.

WHAT THIS ELECTION MEANS FOR AUSTRALIA

Australia is in the first stage of long-term economic decline. Post Covid, there has been a sharp decline in the number of productive people and productive workplaces, and a sharp, seemingly permanent increase in the welfare and black economy.

I would estimate that the proportion of genuinely productive Australians in their workplaces has fallen from 40% to less than one-quarter in the space of just 5 years.

The leaners now easily outnumber the lifters.

Once measured in opinion polling and focus groups, this has produced a political culture of hand-outs – giveaways, all debt-funded, as we have seen in this Federal election campaign.

Even the Liberal Party has joined in, forfeiting its reputation for fiscal responsibility, completing its transformation into a woke sinkhole, more closely resembling the American Democrats than the Howard/Costello era.

This sadly miserable new economy and the new politics that goes with it has given Labor a natural electoral advantage.

If you want big spending, debt funding and a hand-out dependency, underpinned by low productivity, soft working conditions, rorted government programs and the Ponzi scheme of Big Australian migration, you might as well vote for the people who truly believe in it, and have been masters in creating it. That’s the ALP and Albanese.

Australia is in the middle of a perfect economic storm: • the new political culture of a hand-out and welfare economy;

• the post-Covid stupor and industrial-scale abuse of Work From Home;

• the economic self-harm of an energy transition driving up power prices and harming our competitiveness while leaving global surface temperatures unchanged;

• our national ethos of strength and resilience replaced by the woke Alphabet world of victimology;

• mass immigration destroying housing affordability, as the over-regulated supply side can’t keep up;

• inexorable growth in that most horrendous new terminology: the care economy (child care, disability care and aged care), such that 80% of new jobs are debt-funded from the public sector;

• the new national pastime of rorting poorly-designed government programs: leading to a huge and growing black economy in tobacco, the NDIS, training programs and renewable energy scams; and • a political class totally disinterested in labour productivity and economic competitiveness.

No nation on earth has so much available space, yet we have the world’s highest housing prices.

No nation on earth has so many available resources, yet once left in the ground, we have the world’s highest power prices.

The golden age of Hawke/Keating/Howard/Costello economics has ended.

Like many Australians of my age, I tell my children how fortunate I feel to have seen our nation at its best in the 1990s, yet how maudlin and pessimistic I feel for their generation.

Australian public policy used to be run by the creative minds of our national interest.

Now it’s in the hands of a self-serving, blinded elite who can’t see past the next focus-group-generated giveaway.

As the Anzacs might have said, waiting for the third charge at The Nek, “we’re stuffed, mate”. And nothing in this election campaign is helping. In fact, it confirms our worst fears in taking Australia backwards.

Mediocrity in Canberra means the best of our country is now behind us.

Albanese has spent an extra $190 billion in just 3 years, yet living standards have gone backwards by 10 percent. Any random bloke at the local pub could have done better with all that money.

But it seems likely tomorrow that Australians will return Labor to office. I fear our national decline is irreversible.

Mark Latham

2 May 2025