Kevin Rudd yesterday announced the plan to use $4.7 billion from the "Future Fund" to bring our Broadband network into line with the rest of the developed world if the Labor Party wins the next Federal election.
The irony of this is that the Future Fund is funded mostly from the proceeds of the sale of Telstra. Arguably, our broadband network is in such bad shape due to the botched privatisation of Telstra. A case of robbing Peter to pay Paul, of in the case of the Federal Government's plans, robbing the public to pay a few lucky public servants their lifetime pensions.
You see, The Government has conned the public into believing that the "Future Fund" is in fact investing for our future. By simply reading the name, one could be forgiven for thinking that this is the case. However, the Future Fund has been established purely to pay the defined benefit pensions that old time Public Servants are entitled to receive. Great if you are in the minority,who will benefit from lifetime guaranteed income, bad if you're the rest of us who have to save for our retirements ourselves (with the help of our employers since SCG was introduced).
I think this is a great move. Finally, the X & Y Generation will see some benefit from all of these policy changes. Benefit that will help us through our lifetimes. This also is a small step towards rectifying the huge stuff up that has been the privatisation of Telstra without first separating the retail and infrastructure arms.
Bring on faster internet… downloading of movies, games and music quicker for me. Productivity gains? Maybe not!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
You don't quite understand the implications of this policy. The public service pension liability is currently "unfunded" which means that the government will have to pay for it out of consolidated revenue (ie. it will be paid for by increasing our taxes) when the pension payments fall due. The idea of the "future fund" is to setup and, and slowly add to (via allocating part of future budget surpluses to it, rather than just cutting taxes or increasing other expenditures), a fund that will eventually have sufficient money in it to "fund" these public service pensions as they fall due.
Taking a few billion out of the fund to pay for broadband simply means that much more will need to be raised via increased taxes - eventually. It's main feature is that the true cost of this "election promise" doesn't have to be costed by raising taxes or cutting existing expenditure NOW - as the impact of taking money out of the future fund will only have an impact later on - when Rudd has retired!
Regards
http://enoughwealth.com
Yes, I do understand that the public service pensions (CSS & PSS) are unfunded, and in years gone by when these were offered, nobody thought about life expectancies increasing.
However, what I don't like is how the Government has sold this "Future Fund" as something that will benefit us all, where actually it will only benefit a small minority.
The Future Fund seems to be growing pretty rapidly, with budget surpluses and any other public assets that the government decides to sell being pushed into it. However, I'm not sure on what sort of figures are needed to pay out these pensions.
Something needs to be done about our Broadband. Arguably, the reason behind it getting so bad is the sale of Telstra. It makes sense to use part of this sale to fix it up.
I'm probably just a disgruntled member of the Gen X/Y generations, sick of getting nothing. This is something that I can actually benefit from.
Post a Comment