Kevin Rudd has announced that the Government will spend $10.4 billion of the surplus to stimulate spending. One-off cash handouts to pensioners, low income families, first home buyers.
The Prime Minister said he was acting decisively, responsibly and early.
He said his job was to level with the Australian people. And he warned there'd be tough times ahead.
More of that later, but he said that single pensioners and self-funded retirees who hold Commonwealth Senior health cards will get $1400 from December 8. Couples will get $2,100.
Carers will receive a thousand dollars for each person in their care.
The two million families eligible to receive Family Tax Benefit A will get a thousand dollars for each eligible child in their care.
And remember, while Family Tax Benefit part A is subject to an income test, it's not subject to an assets test.
The first home buyer grant will be doubled to $14,000 until June 30, 2009.
It will be tripled to $21,000 on newly constructed homes.
To use a cliché, some would say ‘Holy Nelly’.
And then there's talk of bringing forward infrastructure spending.
So the budget surplus will go from $22 billion to $12 billion.
Now the question is a simple one: Will this money be spent or saved?
Roll up your sleeves, stop the whingeing and the doom-mongering and let's get on with growing Australia… no, the Prime Minister didn't say that.
He said he didn't want to gild the lily, there'll be tough times ahead. Well if that happens, we're telling people to tighten their purses.
Where in all of this does the Reserve Bank stand, jacking up interest rates earlier this year when they should have been left alone.
And where has the so-called inflation fight gone?
A dollar which has gone from 98 US cents to under 70, increasing the cost of imports by 30 odd per cent which is hopelessly inflationary. And now a first home owner's grant when there aren't homes to buy.
Is that going to jack up the price of housing? I would have thought the answer is yes.
Or as Terry McCrann says, are we now just going to restart the very property price bubble that was the core of the problem at the beginning.
And if you guarantee bank loans on top of all of this, are we encouraging banks to lend for property purchases and no worry if things come unstuck: the Government, that's you the taxpayer, will pick up the tab.
The Government has to make sure these are one-off payments, because one thing the Prime Minister didn't say was that the world of the past, where other people paid for your welfare, must surely be over.
It's all very well talking about Wall Street and the decade of greed.
Our greed derives from expecting someone else to pay for our babies, pay for our child care, pay for our maternity leave, pay for our health care, pay for our university education and now pay a more than attractive deposit on our first home.
Someone in leadership has got to start telling us that those days have to be gone.
Where, as I've said often, over 42 per cent of Australian families are receiving more in welfare than they pay in tax.
The Prime Minister said he wasn't going to gild the lily.
By failing to make that point to the nation he was, whether he knew it or not, doing the very thing, gilding the lily, that he said he wouldn't do.
