Word: costello
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...voice of the boom. Treasurer Peter Costello has been Australia's carnival barker for 10 years. Using a backdrop of blissful financial chart lines, Costello can sound like an auctioneer. Promoting his 11th Budget at a recent Liberal Party fundraising event for 700 in Sydney, Costello was in full boom. Heckling the man who was about to cut their taxes by $100 a week was not this crowd's style. Where a property salesman employs a gavel, Costello does a PowerPoint floor show with happy hands and a jerky delivery. You can never predict when Costello's number will switch...
...While John Howard was away on foreign duty, Costello, as acting Prime Minister, looked the part: serious and steady. He traversed the country, taking the TV cameras from the mines of Broken Hill to the illegal foreign fishing vessels smoldering in Darwin harbor. Despite the Budget, a lot of non-Treasury business has been dominating the news: East Timor's troubles, the death spiral of remote Aboriginal communities, nuclear power and uranium enrichment. Custodian Costello slotted right in. Voters, and the Liberal party, are getting a little taste of life after Howard and a carefully managed introduction to his natural...
...nagging worry surrounding Howard and Costello's fiscal pitch is not that the good times will one day end (they will). It's an unease that not enough is being done right now to improve the productivity and, hence, the living standards of future generations. The Commonwealth is debt-free; Howard and Costello have cut government debt with the relish one only sees in workaholic couples who are under the spell of their bank manager's mortgage repayment simulator. So what is a 10-year-old, extremely fortunate administration doing to underwrite a splendid future...
...Australia, it's a great time to be a consumer, a high earner, a budding retiree and a Treasurer for that matter. "This is a Budget which will build opportunity for the future," Costello concluded before commending the Bill to the House. There are indeed measures in this Budget aimed at fixing the nation's creaky roads, under-utilized rail, dying rivers and slow-go ports. There's fresh money for medical research, war planes and national security...
...when you strip away the politics, the largesse and the stagey rhetoric, the Howard-Costello paradigm does not resemble a long-term program to make today's students tomorrow's high-productivity workers. It's the skills, stupid! The 2006-07 Budget does not sing a melody that Australia is at the frontier of innovation, or even that it is on the road to becoming a Big Country in the world marketplace. Same old, same old song. Whatever, never mind. Just like the government, today we're all living large...