Idiot wind blows in from the west
TERRY MCCRANN THE AUSTRALIAN SEPTEMBER 21, 2013 12:00AM
www.theaustralian.com.au/archive/bu...n-from-the-west/story-e6frg9k6-1226723980571#
IS West Australian Premier Colin Barnett the stupidest man in Australia or merely the stupidest politician?
New Prime Minister Tony Abbott built his entire political campaign over three long and bitterly contested years on holding Julia Gillard to account for her broken "there will be no carbon tax" promise from 2010.
He has staked not only his government's entire credibility, and indeed its very ability to function, but also his own personal integrity on not repeating that fundamental breach of faith with voters.
For him to now do so, for him to do exactly the same thing as Gillard did, would utterly and irredeemably cripple both his prime ministership and the very functioning of government.
He would turn every day of his next three years into a corruscating blitz of ridicule, abuse and deserved contempt, far worse than suffered by Gillard. Ending only in certain defeat at the next election.
So up pops the premier prat from the west to ask that he do exactly that. To show "leadership" by abandoning his core promise not to change, and most certainly not to increase, the GST.
And why should the federal government increase the GST? To bail Barnett out from his self-created big-spending mess, which has seen WA state debt explode, culminating in the loss of its triple-A credit rating.
The old Aussie saying about someone not being able to organise a piss-up in a brewery now has a 21st-century equivalent. Barnett has shown himself to be a state leader who can't balance the books while reaping the huge revenues from the biggest boom any state has ever experienced.
It is an interesting replay of what happened in Queensland when former Labor premiers Peter Beattie and Anna Bligh ditched that state's formerly bipartisan fiscal conservatism, going on spending sprees that sent their state debt soaring and also lost their triple-A.
The Liberal Barnett has shown us that premier ineptitude and fiscal stupidity can be entirely bipartisan.
If his call for Abbott to lift the GST to bail him and his state out wasn't idiotic enough in itself, the purported politician doesn't even understand basic political realities.
There is no way that Abbott could get an increase in the GST through the Labor-Green majority Senate that prevails until next July. Does Barnett even understand it requires legislation, or does he think Abbott can just "make it so"?
And there'd be just as little chance of getting it through the micro-party-controlled Senate after July. Clive Palmer and his acolytes and most, if not all, the other likely new micro-party senators want to abolish taxes, including the carbon and mining taxes, not increase them.
So here we have this idiot from the west advising Abbott to trash himself and his government; all for utterly no point.
Persuasive as it might seem in the privacy of what passes for Barnett's brain, it is advice that Abbott has and will continue to politely but utterly reject.