Ken Henry, I luv u....

One of the few pleasures left (when faced with the mountains of negative financial news which greets unwary readers each week) is to find that Secretary to the Treasury Ken Henry has spoken out again.

This time it was his Post-Budget Address to the Australian Business Economists last Tuesday:

This is story-telling of extraordinary complexity. And while it hasn't tested Ross, it clearly has exceeded the reading age of many.
Consider, for example, the reporting of the budget in the Wall Street Journal Asia last week. According to that reporting, in all of the decisions taken by the Government in response to the global recession, the only ones that will have any stimulatory impact on the economy are the 'tiny' personal income tax cuts announced in the 2008-09 Budget. The journal also informs its unfortunate readers that revenue downgrades alone would not have driven the Australian budget into deficit. And to cap it off, readers were told, in what is surely one of the most ironic sentences ever uttered in macroeconomic analysis, that '(t)his Keynesian revival comes at a particularly bad time, given that tax revenues are falling as the economy slows, a normal feature of economic downturns'. Apparently, the right time for a 'Keynesian revival', involving the spending of large amounts of public money, is when tax revenue is strong and rising, a normal feature of economic boom times.
As you know, I don't always agree with Australian commentators. But our newspaper readers can be thankful that they don't often have to confront material that is quite that bad.

Just love to hear that Taree boy's plain speaking.