A budget built on ignorance, arrogance, elitism and social naivety

Ignorance, arrogance, elitism and social naivety underpin the latest Australian Budget.

Everything is life is ideologically driven, even these thoughts, but opinion that surrounds them and their associated beliefs that endorse them, or otherwise, are disparate and seemingly limitless.

A financial budget arising from a democracy and intended to serve those living within that democracy is a complex beast and the author, or authors, always face an intrigue that exceeds their ability to deliver.

Present budgetary intent to deliver smaller government camouflaged as savings and efficiency, and “repairing the budget”, contrasts with the facts as explained by Nobel Prize winning economist, Joseph E. Steglitz.

Writing in “Globalization and its Discontents” about the East Asia crisis of the late 1990s, Steglitz argued that nations that best endured the crisis where those with strong government participation.

Using the recent budget to pursue its ideologies, our government seems to have dropped the reins, and even dismounted, and handed control of its charger over to chance and private enterprise.

As we rush ill-equipped into a world unknown, it seems we are being asked put our trust in faith and leave fact and reason to rust.

The rather brutal facts are that humanity, and that includes you and me, and of course Tony Abbott and his cohort, presently faces its greatest ever threat and urgently needs both scientific facts and all the information it can get about those realities from reliable sources.

Joseph E. Steglitz.

The institutions that both provide facts and help us understand that information were punished or disbanded in the recent Budget, yet millions have been set aside for the provision of chaplains in schools – a place where science should be exemplified, but it is being usurped by faith.

“Trust us” is the plaintive cry from Joe Hockey as he tries to assuage our wounded intellect that is left limping and staggering about from a blizzard of broken promises.

Trust is not one of those things that cannot be bought and beyond that, the intent of our present government became obvious, and our suspicions triggered, from the moment it left the ministerial science seat empty, illustrating it preferred fantasy to fact.

Anecdotal asides, driven by populist credos seem preferred, leaving the administration of Australia locked into thought processes that might have had some relevance a century ago, but inadequate in every sense for a future that every shred of scientific evidence illustrates will be quite different for what was.

With yesterday’s men at the helm, and collecting knights and dames as we go, we sail blithely about with the poor, pensioners, students and the states stoking the boilers, allowing the rich, flaunting their ideological map, to loll about as we seek refuge on Fantasy Island.