Little Sir Echo

The world watched in awful fascination as rabid Tea Party politicians brought America to its knees and caused stock exchanges world-wide to haemorrhage, because these same elected representatives mindlessly insisted that Small Government was God and pursued a goal of unrealistic federal budget cuts.

In Australia a Coalition Opposition led by Tony Abbott is obviously intent on mimicking this disastrous course with the policy announcement that should Tones the Terrible win government he expects to produce small government and $70 billion in budget savings.

One could sack as many as 20,000 federal public servants and hole the government grants system and never come anywhere near saving that many billions, so it doesn’t take a genius to see who will be the bunnies making the remainder of these excessive ‘savings’.

That amount of money withdrawn from federal government spending would represent roughly $3,000 less per person each year spent on either vital health services, education, family assistance payments, old age pension increases or PBS medications – just to name a few of the areas to which Abbott and Hockey could take their knives.

This level of mass sackings and belt tightening imposed on average Australian families will be painful to endure and also something which would put the wind up voters and possibly the market once it looked closely at the flow-on effects.