Regret. At the end of every commodity boom, there is the frustrated national feeling that ‘we pissed away another resource boom’.
It’s early to say the boom is over but The Australian starts the post-mortem on the latest bust (click the first link to avoid the paywall).
“If you look at history, Australia is one of the best managers of adversity the world has seen, and the worst managers of prosperity,” observed The Economist magazine in the mid-1980s. Despite a burst of liberalising reforms in the late 1990s, it appears Australia has reverted to type.
Analysis from the Grattan Institute shows the federal government has squandered almost 96 per cent of its $190 billion windfall courtesy of Australia’s resources boom.
Something about a resource boom makes people think it will last forever and governments are notoriously bad savers. This time the commodity producers had two opportunities: the pre and post-crisis booms. They were opportunities to build savings and implement reforms that would last generations.
