Australia is proving yet again that replacing a government can profoundly impact citizen well-being, Alan Austin reports.
THE WORLD IS CHANGING. Already this year, elections have switched administrations in Indonesia, Pakistan and Slovakia. Major countries with elections and possible regime change still looming include Britain, South Africa, Brazil, Mexico, Austria and the USA.
Voters in many countries have elected incompetent regimes and soon regretted it. Conversely, several populations have benefitted from wise democratic decisions. Of these, Australia is exhibit A, as we shall see.
Snapshots of severe slumps
One major electoral blunder was Turkey electing Recep Tayyip Erdoğan as President in 2014. The jobless rate soared thereafter to peak at 14.1% in mid-2019, well before COVID-19. With 4.6 million Turks out of work, that was the worst pre-COVID-19 blow-out by far in the 38-member OECD.
At 8.7% in February, the jobless rate is still too high.
We are indebted here to Trading Economics for their excellent charts, which show jobless rates and other outcomes for 196 countries going back several decades. Please note that the Y-axis usually does not start at zero. IA has added colour and descriptors for clarity.
In June last year, Finland changed from a reformist Government led by Sanna Marin to a conservative Administration under Petteri Orpo.
Early signs are troubling, with the jobless rate averaging 8.37% over the last three months, the highest in several years.
Germany also appears to be experiencing a rise in the number of jobless since Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union was defeated in December 2021 by Olaf Scholz’s Social Democratic Party. The jobless trajectory through Merkel’s 16-year reign was impressive.
She inherited chronically high unemployment following Germany’s earlier reunification. She then presided over a steady decline, with blips during the 2008 Global Financial Crisis and the 2020 pandemic.
That trajectory has shifted upwards following the change of government.
New Zealand has also experienced increased unemployment since the beginning of 2022. The graph below shows favourable outcomes under Prime Ministers John Key, Bill English and Jacinda Ardern.
The surge began under Chris Hipkins and seems to be accelerating under Christopher Luxon, though it’s still early days.
Unemployment in the U.S. had been in a long-term decline since the 2008 Global Financial Crisis until the 2020 COVID-19 downturn. The gross mismanagement of the pandemic led to the worst jobless surge of all OECD members. By April 2020, more than 23 million Americans were jobless.
Since the Biden Administration took charge in 2021, recovery has been impressive.
No sign yet of the jobless rise seen in Germany, New Zealand and elsewhere.
Italians also appear to have benefitted from their change of government in October 2022.
This confirms – so far at least – IA’s optimistic outlook at the time.
The last three French presidents have presided over contrasting jobless trajectories. Employment wasn’t a high priority for Nicolas Sarkozy. François Hollande had even less success until midway through his five-year term when the tide turned.
In August 2014, Hollande appointed an unknown 37-year-old philosophy graduate working in the banking sector as minister for the economy. Whether or not it was Emmanuel Macron’s deft touch, the economy rapidly improved.
Partly on the basis of his brief ministerial success, Macron won the top job in 2017.
He is now two years into his second term, with the economy continuing to improve.
Australia again leads the world
Australian voters in May 2022 tossed out the worst economic managers in Australia’s history — based on actual outcomes. Since then, the jobless rate has remained below 4.0% every month, bar one.
That contrasts with an average rate of 6.1% through the Tony Abbott years, 5.6% under Malcolm Turnbull and 5.4% through Scott Morrison’s tenure.
The same pattern of immediate dramatic improvement is evident with other key outcomes that IA has charted recently, including construction, budget surpluses, full-time jobs, taxes collected, income distribution and distribution of wealth. We will chart other variables in due course.
These all show that over the last 22 months, Australia has had the strongest improvement in published economic measures of all developed nations.
External agencies expose the Coalition
Last month’s report from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), alluded to briefly here, clearly shows the stark difference between Labor and the Coalition.
That data tracked actual outcomes on multiple fiscal measures from 2015 to the present, with projections through to 2029.
By 2015, two Joe Hockey Budgets had set Australia back to a dismal 65th place on budget balance. By 2021, the ranking had tumbled to 91st, out of 116 nations.
Then, after just two Labor Budgets, Australia had rebounded to 24th.
The budget balance is the normal annual budget surplus or deficit. The primary balance excludes interest on the debt in order to show current outcomes since interest costs are usually attributable to previous regimes.
On the latter, the Coalition fared even worse, tumbling from 63rd to 105th place between 2017 and 2021. Labor’s recovery to the 28th spot is impressive.
Government expenditure, gross debt and net debt all blew out under the Coalition and are now being salvaged.
Global agencies along with all competent economists know Australia’s economic outcomes are vastly better under Labor. It is a travesty that most of the mainstream media keep telling voters the opposite.
Such is Australia’s doom.
Alan Austin is an Independent Australia columnist and freelance journalist. You can follow him on Twitter @alanaustin001.
Related Articles
- Kids now don’t want to vote (and other fun facts about Australian elections)
- Partisan media, incoherent Labor and the rabble clings to power
- Election 2019: Post mortems reveal what happened is no mystery
- Ending the Coalition's history of human rights abuse
- Election 2019: How to ignore the noise so you can make a sensible vote
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License
Support independent journalism Subscribe to IA.
