‘Small government extremists’ a threat; former reserve bank head.

Former Australian Reserve Bank head, Bernie Fraser found someone willing to listen to him today and cut loose on all that is wrong with the country from his perspective, that is. It seems that what we need most is a caring, compassionate government committed to ‘fairness’.

Bernie is upset that Treasurer, Wayne Swan is talking about bringing the budget into surplus, which he calls a “Dud Policy.” Given that Labor has not produced a surplus in living memory, and this government immediately went from Howard surpluses to massive deficits, Bernie has little to worry about other than the damage that could result from anything Gillard/Swan attempt.

For this government to produce a surplus would require a book cooking effort good enough for Swan to win ‘Master chef’ next season.

Fraser rails against the incompetence of this government, and rightly so:

But Mr Fraser says Labor's "disastrous" mismanagement of stimulus programs it put in place to counter the global downturn have given government spending a bad name.

"The education building program, the insulation building programs, unfortunately those programs were pretty disastrous and the implications of those sorts of failures have rebounded on all government spending and it's really given the Coalition some free kicks," he said.

"Here is a Government spending money and wasting money and therefore governments shouldn't spend, they shouldn't run deficits, they shouldn't have debt.

His main problem with this though is that it will provide ammunition to proponents of small government, who he views with contempt:

He says Labor's failings could pave the way for a long era of politics dominated by an extreme ideology of small government with parallels in the United States. "To listen to the Coalition spokespeople, I hear echoes of the Republicans and the more extreme Tea Party Republicans - all this folksy nonsense about governments have to live within their means, deficits are bad, debt's bad," he said.

The main argument for smaller government is not coming from the Liberals, The people of Victoria have discovered that a change of government merely gets rid of big government Laborites, and replaces them with big government conservatives. It is coming from the populace, who are tired of profligate busybodies who have their hand in every transaction in the nation, and have watched the current government pass new regulations at the rate of 77 per week for the last four years.

Four years of Labor has resulted in another 16,000 regulations to be obeyed over the top of all the ones we had before.