BER Rorts are failure of socialism, not implementation

 

We’ve seen buildings overpriced by hundreds of thousands of dollars. We’ve seen exorbitant administration and management fees. We’ve seen pot plants costing 23 thousand dollars. We’ve seen a tiny school charged $77,000 for "design documentation, field data and site management" even though they didn't get a new building. All of this is your money. It was borrowed from China on your behalf, by the current Labor regime, and you and your children will be paying it back at interest.

 

 

 

 

It is important for taxpayers realise just how this scheme came about. It was engineered by the then Education Minister, and now Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, a woman who was a member of the communist-sympathising ‘Socialist Forum’ organisation at Melbourne University and who continued her career in that tradition by joining the socialist faction of the Labor Party. This socialist, big-government ideology is the reason for her failures, not implementation incompetence.

 

The program would have been a black hole, whoever was implementing it.

 

The irony is delicious. During the global financial crisis, Prime Minister Gillard vigorously echoed the ramblings of her predecessor in proclaiming the cause of the crisis to be extreme free market economics. Friedrich A. Hayek, the great Austrian School economist and LA favourite, was specifically singled out for criticism despite the fact that Hayek’s economic prescriptions were the opposite of those that have been pursued by western governments since the great depression of the 1930s. Hayek repeatedly and eloquently stated that government policies, like insulation and BER schemes, were destined for corruption, rip-offs and failure because politicians and bureaucrats working from a central location cannot reflect the collective, impersonal knowledge of millions of people in the marketplace.

 

Hayek came back to bite Gillard on the backside.

 

Ms Gillard and her cohorts injected billions of taxpayer dollars into a building sector via centrally planned preferred contractors under instruction from state government bureaucracies. The result was a massive bubble, with inflated costs, inefficiency, corruption and dissatisfaction. The exact same distortions accompanied the insulation program. An artificial bubble was created by the government which eventually had to burst and destroy the very industry it was supposed to be supporting.

 

Magnify the above situation many times and replace pink batts with fiat money and you have your global financial crisis. The US Federal Reserve created trillions of dollars out of thin air and injected it into the banking system producing a bubble in housing prices and derivatives speculation. Hayek condemned central banking and favoured competing currencies organically arising in the marketplace. If this policy was pursued there would be no global financial crisis.