Bugger the budget

OPINION: Here at Rabid Reseller we don’t think much of this latest budget. This Costello bloke has no idea at all if he thinks tax cuts will make shopkeepers happy. We thought he knew that shopkeepers don’t pay any tax, that’s why he said we had to have the GST. So tax cuts are never going to make us happy here in the shop unless they’re huge enough to put real money in punters’ pockets.

Six bucks a week. Gimme a break Pete. That doesn’t even cover the extra dollars that Joe Public is paying for his mortgage after the interest rate rise that you said would never happen as long as we voted for you and your mate Johnnie.

And now the Reserve Bank is pondering another interest rate rise, because they think we’re all going to go mad with our six-buck tax cuts.

We’ve decided that what’s really needed is more deregulation and more competition in the whole area of interest rates and fiscal policy. Who made the Reserve Bank the interest rate boss anyway? Here at Rabid we can still remember when the government decided what the interest rate was going to be, and home owners were well-pleased with those fixed rates.

Welcome to the launch of Rabid Reserve, the new alternative interest rate benchmark that will be making policy decisions to help resellers everywhere to make an honest dollar or six.

First off, we’re lowering the base rate to 3 percent. If it’s good enough for the Yanks, it’s good enough for Australia. After all, they’re the most powerful economy on this planet and several nearby solar systems, so why not aim for best practice.

Matter of fact, lets save a whole bunch of money by not having a Reserve Bank Board at all.

Those merchant bankers got a darn sight more than six dollars in their tax cuts so we’d save a tidy sum by just asking them not to attend any more meetings. Next item, peg the Aussie dollar to the US dollar. Just about everything on the shelf here either comes from the US or gets sold to us in US dollars. How much easier is this going to be if we don’t have to keep screwing around with exchange rates?

Now this is going to save a truckload of money at the banks too. For starters, they can fire all those foreign exchange traders that keep sending the bank broke every time they punt on the wrong currency.

Who needs Forex traders when you know that the dollar will be the same price tomorrow as it is today? Once we’ve got ourselves hitched to the US dollar we can also track their interest rates as well. That solves two problems that the Reserve Bank has never managed to get right.

We’re confident that Pete Costello will be a strong backer of our proposals. The last place that tried it was Ecuador and it all went according to plan except that the president got run out of town.

When Johnnie gets run out of town that will save Pete from a nasty squabble about who’s the best bloke for the job. Sure there was a minor amount of civil disobedience and the occasional overreaction by the troops but at least everyone knew what a dollar was worth.

That’s not likely to happen here anyway, as all our troops are overseas, wishing their wages would buy them something nice in foreign lands. Well, under Rabid Reserve even the army will be on-side, with their dollars now at the same value as the US marines’ money. In fact, if things get a tad nasty we can probably expect our good friend George Dubya to send a few marines over here to lend a hand maintaining law and order. Heck, they do it already for people they don’t even like so they’d be sure to help their mates.

Now wait just a minute, we’ve missed the obvious solution to all this financial foolishness. All we need to do is ask Dubya to accept our nomination as the southern-most state of the US.

Another problem solved. Welcome to US-tralia.

Gotta go, customers waiting!