I was having a conversation about the likely outcome of the NSW elections on Radio SkidRow, a Sydney community radio station, just days before the March 26 election.
“We know what is going to happen after [the Liberals'] Barry O’Farrell wins the election, don’t we?” I said. “He’ll wait a couple of weeks then he will announce that Labor has left the cupboard bare so they’ll have to bring in an emergency budget.
“Suddenly there’ll be no more smiling, cuddly, ‘moderate’ Barry. Out will come the big axe against public sector jobs, public services … It is the standard incoming neoliberal government script.”
What I totally underestimated was how fast this script would be acted out.
Just a few hours after being sworn in as NSW Premier, O’Farrell announced that he had “discovered” (actually he got it from his first briefing by Treasury officials) a $4.5 billion “black hole” in the budget left by the former Keneally Labor government.
He called for an emergency audit, and would not rule out public sector cuts after the results of the audit came back.
The alleged $4.5 billion black hole is actually the sum of new Treasury estimates of likely deficits over the next three financial years.
The biggest of these projected deficits was $2.4 billion for 2014-2015.
So the new O’Farrell government hasn’t discovered an actually existing budget “black hole” or deficit.
However, these projections do confirm the irresponsibilty of the privatisation agenda shared by the ALP and the Coalition. The ALP’s privatisation of public assets, such as electricity and the NSW state lotteries, will reduce future government income.
Every incoming neoliberal government needs to “discover” a shocking financial deficit that can then be used to justify cuts to jobs and social services, and tax cuts and subsidies to big business to help them “get the economy going”.
Remember the then inconvenient advice given to O’Farrell by the infamous former Victorian Liberal premier, Jeff Kennett, a month before the NSW election: “Go fast early on,” Kennett said.
“If you attack all areas of government at the same time, you break your forces and each then settle down to protect their particular patch. You divide your enemy — old military tactic.”
For ordinary people, this really means: Brace for pain and pray some wealth will trickle down from the boost to corporate profits.
But now is not the time to agonise. It is time to start organising the resistance to the O’Farrell government’s impending attacks on our jobs, social services and rights.
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