I keep insisting I'm not the only one calling this Coalition Government stupid. Really, they are saying and doing things that are so stupid, it invites the accurate observation:
Mr Morrison told a gathering in Sydney yesterdaythat households carrying large amounts of debt should take some comfort from rising asset prices, including house prices.
Investment expert Roger Montgomery, who manages more than $1 billion worth of funds, did not hold back in his criticism.
"I think that is one of the most inane and stupid things I have ever heard," he said.
Mr Montgomery argued the very reason for the rise in asset prices is due to the debt used to buy it.
He said it would not take much for highly indebted Australians to be caught out, unable to service their financial commitments.
"The reality is that firstly, if house prices are elevated because of debt, there should be no comfort in the price of a house — it's elevated simply because of the debt," he said.I've been blogging here for years and I tell you, I can't recall a time before 2013 when the Federal government appeared so inept and stupidity was the near-daily dose. Commentators and journalists never called out the government for being outright stupid before then with the regularity with which they do it now.
"When interest rates start going up — and they will as soon as, in some cases February for some of the banks — investors are going to find they won't have a tenant, or they won't have a tenant and they'll have higher interest rates to pay, and that debt will come home to roost."
That's not to say just because everybody is doing it must be true or that it's okay (as per Kant, thank you very much moral categorical imperatives), but you have to stop and wonder when exactly the Coalition made stupidity their central modus operandi for policy.
There are things the Federal Government can do to take the pressure out of the Bubble that is driving up household debt. The fact that it won't is because those policies hurt the investor class whom they have always represented. Just as it is impossible to convince a person who's job it is to be paid to be unconvinced, Scott Morrison is in the pockets of the investor lobby who want more of the Property Bubble, not less. So on a very simple level, it is in Scott Morrison's personal best interests to keep ignoring things that tell him to implement policies for the greater good in favour of his electoral base, - and by extension - in order keep his cushy job as treasurer.
So yeah. We have a crisis of thinking at the top of this country that is being funded by vested interests. The problem of course is that the baseline operational brief of any government is utilitarian. That is to say, the line from Mr. Spock in 'Star Trek: Wrath of Khan', "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few", should be standard operating procedure. Any government that can't discharge this responsibility is acting against the interests of its own population. Even Machiavelli states in 'The Discourses' the point of good government is to provide stable governance AND to maximise the benefits to as many people in the polity possible. (A lot of people only go by the first dictum and assume Machiavelli would support military juntas. It's not true because military juntas inevitably fail the latter half of that dictum).
The fact that this government wants to have the needs of the vested interests outweigh the needs of most Australian is essentially where the stupidity starts. It's amazing to think these people have expensive private school educations and they can't seem to assess the fundamental problem that makes them say and do such stupid things. There's really no telling where the money went. I guess it went into lobbying politicians into spreading the stupid.
Schools lobbying politicians to spread the stupid. Who'd a thunk it?
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