Friday, March 2, 2012

Dreaming

Good luck with that.

"Under Defence's current plans, the commonwealth will spend up to $250 billion over the next 20 years on acquiring and sustaining new ships and submarines, an enormous opportunity by any measure."

I see doldrums.

Huckster.

7 comments:

Perplexed said...

Eric, to put things into perspective, please access the following link.
http://afr.com/p/opinion/labor_votes_leaking_away_GDPOP0lPqL9318TQWsoHhN
This current government, has created 450,000 odd jobs in the public service in the last four years. Standard ratios regarding the cost of employing people in the public servants, gives a bill of $36.48 billion a year. Has the employment in the health, education and public service benefited us at all? Not that I can see.
My wife works in the Health Department Queensland, on the frontline, and all she sees is a myriad of new positions in administration and general garbage needs.

Would rather see money put into things to produce goods than merely create hundreds of thousands of useless public service jobs, but bring nothing to the country nor produce anything.

I'm sure these numbers under the current administration and climbing at the same rate.

Unknown said...

Not a big fan of bloated government in any form.

I am just curious how the current crew of incompetents intend to waste a couple of hundred billion in 10 years. Certainly, the son-of-collins, AWD, LHD, and F-35 are things that don't really bring true defensive value to the nation.

Perplexed said...

Get rid of DMO and put in place real project managment, as practised by industries that know what they are doing, eg the mining indsustry.
It can be done, and done well.

Canuck Fighter said...

My rough math says that is a 75% increase in defense spending on the capital side. Either the next big war is in Australia's neighbourhood or there is some good drugs being consumed at the Ministry of Defense.

Bushranger 71 said...

With the demise of former PM Rudd, there is now opportunity for Defence Minister Smith to push for freezing of Rudd's unrealistic DWP2009 and the associated 10 year Defence Capability Plan pending a priority strategic review by Australian national intelligence agencies. That would more likely justify some rationalisation of military capabilities.

The big question is of course whether the Government (and Opposition) will still be predisposed to favour subsidisation of foreign-parented defence industry and associated hugely costly job creation in lieu of more cost-effective hardware spending to maintain adequate and credible military preparedness.

Perplexed said...

Bushranger, I do not think anyone would understand what you are talking abut, unfortunately
Regards

Albatross said...

Re Bushranger 71's comments: our current defence policy is a matter of life imitating art. We're distressingly close to the last chapters of Joe Heller's classic 'Catch 22', where Yossarian and his comrades reach for a parachute and find instead an empty pack with a note from Milo Minderbinder in the parachute's place telling them that the parachute has been removed and "for the better good of the corporation", has been put to better use elsewhere.

We're not far from that in today's ADF - where the message is "we haven't supplied you with a system that works, but rest assured, this unworking system has provided lots of jobs in marginal electorates and lots of commissions to me and my (almost always) foreigner mates."