The reason why nothing happened that the economist predicted was due to the stimulus! If Australia has proposed a new mining tax which will make it the most expensive place to mine in the world, then why are resource stocks falling in all stock exchanges! I agree that mining companies have gone gun shy since the new tax was proposed but don't under estimate jittery world markets due to the Europrean financial crisis! Greeces economy has totally collapsed and Spain is not too far away and the EU bail out has everyone nervous! It will impose similar conditions as the Treaty of Versailles upon them!
The only thing the economic stimulus did was move our country's hard-earned savings into the bank accounts of licenced clubs and wealthy retailers - the very types of organizations that prey on the the people who received it. We had an economy strong enough to withstand very severe external pressures - indeed, most of the economies that we deal with in the world would have collapsed before ours, but our government made a knee jerk reaction and spent our entire surplus like it was the last Christmas. As a result we are NOW exposed to the global financial crisis like never before. And what is our government's reaction to the realisation it has a bare cupboard? Well, lets just whack the biggest of taxes on the ONLY commodity we have to export that is capable of carrying our economy through these tough global times - let's not just bite the hand of the one that feeds us, let's gnaw it's whole bloody arm off! Yes, the world markets are jittery and resource stocks are falling - all the more reason that we should have reined in our spending last year and protected our country's single biggest income stream, not blown it in a few months of madness and then turned to the resource sector to bail it out. The resources and those that mine them are not a bottomless pit and for our own protection and financial health the whole sector needs our government to nurture and protect them in our hour of crisis. Of course mining companies are gun shy - they don't become successful profit making businesses over many many years on the back of their financial stupidity. Our government would do very very well to listen to them and learn from them but unfortunately listening and learning does not appear to be one of it's strong points. This current government are proving more and more eerily similar to the government that holds the mantle as the most financially irresponsible and incompetent in our country's history - Gough Whitlam's bunch of ragtag incompetents - all action and no thought.
Sorry Smokey but i will disagree as i obviously come from a different political perspective (Keynesian)!
Australia's stimulus is and was a fraction per capita in Australia to the rest of the world and is hailed world wide as a responsible economic measure. The minimal loss of jobs saved people's dignity, kept GST rolling in and reduced welfare payments! Gough may have been to radical but lets face it, what he has introduced has remained even though we have had conservative goverments since then! The US has only just bought in it's equivalent to Medicare and the US has a user pays health system that further marginalises poor people! Conservative governments have sold all our utilities in the interests of competition yet these utilities have become incredibly inefficient to the point where it is costing more lives than insulation ever will. People in the country are losing children to asthma attacks as no-one from Telstra will fix their land lines or they live in areas that recieves no coverage (98 per cent coverage, what a joke! Everyone in the bush knows what a joke that is!)
As Australians we are incredibly conservative as compared to, say, European countries such as Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland and France! It is not too much different to footy, to spend is to create money!
