ERROL PARKER | Editor-at-large | Contacts
A senior economist at the Diamantina Credit Union (DCU) has simply shrugged today during his address as the Betootan Press Club when asked by a reporter where he thought the markets and economy were headed this year.
“Who knows?” said the DCU market guru Paul Sutcliffe.
“I don’t fucken know. Anyone who tries to tell you doesn’t have a clue, either. I mean, there’s not much you can do really. You ease rates and inflation goes bananas again. How do you ease the pressure on housing and housing affordability quickly? You bring less people in to the country. You do that and we have a labour shortage. Pretty much because your typical skippy won’t do a lot of jobs that some foreigner will do with a smile on their face. So you need to keep bringing people in. Who’s going to look after the Boomers when they can no longer toilet themselves? Their kids? The kids their kids went to school with? Not a chance. You need to attack this problem from another front. Doing it this way is like trying to take Moscow from the west. If you’re going to succeed in taking Moscow, you need to come from the east, like the Mongols did,”
“But yeah, as for that other front, who knows? Fixing the intergenerational rot that’s been left to grow in this country is like feeding Clive Palmer a tray of lasagna, collecting the slurry at the other end of him the next day and trying to put it back together with your tongue. It’s pretty much impossible. I’m not going to try and predict anything. There’s just too many variables. The only way millions of kids will buy a home in this country will be if we go to war with Russia and China and there’s some sort of solider-settler programme for the ones that didn’t get bayonetted by a relatively-hairless and traditionally cute Chinese soldier in the oilfields of Myanmar. Then and only then will they get to enjoy the spoils of surviving open warfare – a soldier settler Meriton dog box or if they’re an officer, a Hotondo tent that was built by a troupe of apprentices that’d sooner nail their ball bag to a chair than solve a sudoku puzzle. My son had to get his builder because half the doors were on upside down,”
“I’ll telling you, what I’ve said could happen. Or it might not. Who knows? Certainly not economists.”
More to come.
