Step Aside, Argentina. It’s Australia’s Turn

Travel is great, so far as it goes. But even all these many decades since the dawn of global roaming, we’re still mostly locked into the same old format.

We buy a ticket, climb aboard, bump along for a while in the sometimes awkward company of fellow humans, alight at some pre-determined point on the earth’s surface, drink dodgy local water, spend a week sweating and shivering in a hotel and then return home.

The more evolved among us crave a dimensionally superior tourism experience. We’ve been there before when it comes to national borders. Not impressed at all with your basic seven-continent destination menu. That’s because, rather than skipping across oceans, we want to skip entire eras.

Tim Blair appears in every Quadrant.
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And little wonder. Envy-inducing authors have been teasing us about time travel since Enrique Gaspar penned El Anacronópete in 1887. In that pioneering work, Madrid-born Gaspar—a diplomat and writer who sounds more like a potent Spanish cigarette brand—sent his protagonist back in time so he could marry his niece. On second thoughts, maybe it was more pervy than pioneering.

By comparison, subsequent time-travelling novels by Mark Twain (A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court) and H.G. Wells (The Time Machine—telegraphing his punches in the title there) were and remain positively wholesome, except for the torment they excite in men’s souls about the possibility of jumping generations.

And not in the sordid way intended by Senor Gaspar’s degenerate central character.

Well, here’s the good news. Time travel is here. For a modest outlay of only a few thousand dollars, anybody at all can board what appears to be a standard international flight and be catapulted forward by several decades. I did it myself in January. I paid my fare and I saw Australia’s future—a particularly alarming version of Australia’s future, it must be said—with my own astonished eyes.

A minor point of clarification: technically, all I did was fly to Buenos Aires, Argentina. But that’s where our whole country is headed if certain Australian trends continue. Spookily, at about the same time I was conducting in-depth Buenos Aires bar research, the Australian’s foreign editor Greg Sheridan filed a column precisely summarising my time-vaulting theory that Argentina now is where we might be in thirty years or so.

“Argentina, like Australia, has a small, well-educated population and a big territory with agricultural and mineral riches,” Greg wrote. “Under Juan Peron it developed stylised and ideological politics, featuring ever-growing transfer payments, crippling budget deficits, pro-trade-union industrial relations, second-rate nationalism and creeping authoritarianism.”

All sounding very Aussie so far. Very Aussie indeed, and more so by the word. “Its government and people assumed there would always be money to spend,” Greg continued. “The political system became toxic and abusive. The only thing people believed from government was cash in hand. It’s the path to ruin. It’s the path we’re seemingly on.”

You bet we are. At present, according to Box Advisory Services accounting firm director Davie Mach, small-to-medium Australian businesses have anywhere between six and twelve tax laws to follow, depending on their location, nature of work, trading areas and so on. That’s not so bad, but it is of course getting worse. Under state and federal Labor governments, there is a renewed regulatory mood afoot in Australia with an accompanying hunger for taxation “justice” (translation: shaking down achievers and investors, enriching deadbeats and scammers).

Vault ahead to Australia’s potential future, which is Argentina’s ruinous present. Argentina demands company payments on more than 160 different taxes, meaning this once-wealthy and pro-business nation has become progressively poorer and is now ranked among the world’s worst in terms of taxation agony. “This not only creates enormous economic pressure to entrepreneurs,” Argentinian IT innovator Manuel Araoz wrote last year, “but an administrative and compliance nightmare.”

Yet here in Australia we keep adding—or refusing to cut or eliminate—taxes, regulations and compliance requirements on everything from housing to transport, energy to publishing and childcare to Chiko Rolls, for all I know. You don’t end up in Argentina’s shattered situation due to isolated seismic events. You get there incrementally, one tax, one rule and one regulation at a time.

Interestingly, Argentina’s economic circumstances—which may be curtly assessed as a Titanic-level dumpster fire omnishambles—were not entirely caused by dumb old leftism, although leftism is hugely to blame. Much of the Argentine economic anti-miracle is due to Peronism. Greg Sheridan provided a useful overview above of this particular bespoke political structure, which isn’t easy to define in traditional left-right terms.

Perhaps University of Rostock academics Wolfgang Muno and Christian Pfeiffer, writing for the European Consortium for Political Research, might illuminate matters. Take it away, boys:

“In summary, Peronism under Peron was developmentalist and nationalist-protectionist, establishing a conservative welfare state. It was, in general, more conservative. Under Menem, there had been a neoliberal shift and, overall, the ideology was generally more economically liberal and socially conservative. The Kirchners’ era, meanwhile, saw a resurgence of developmentalism, protectionism, and economic nationalism. Their period of governance was markedly more progressive left, as evidenced, for example, by support for LGBTQ+ rights.”

Trust academics to take something unclear and add confusion. Even so, what comes through is that Peronism, like our own modern Labor and Liberal parties, treats economics as an emotional or sentimental pursuit. Peronism put “fairness” — a terrifying word when spoken by social justice types — at its economic core. “The two arms of Peronism are social justice and social help,” President Peron wrote. “With them, we can give a hug of justice and love to the people.”

He gave them, through applications of Peronism that far outlived himself, hyperinflation and other elements of economic devastation—all in the name of fairness. For example, hugely expensive electricity bills were judged to be unfair. A sensible response to this might be reducing the cost of electricity production by smashing unions and such. But Argentina went with fairness instead, which means subsidies.

This causes absurd outcomes. “The average European spends around US$40 a month on electricity,” the Economist noted last year. “The average Argentine spends around US$5—eight times less.” But with all those paybacks flying around, Argentinian taxpayers are hammered each year by an electricity subsidy cost of US$12.5 billion.

Australia’s taxpayers are copping the same treatment thanks to our various governments’ also equating subsidies with fairness. Electricity bill relief payments of up to $500 were delivered last year by a federal government that by its anti-coal actions is causing those bills to surge. It’s a Buenos Aires squeeze play.

Speaking of taxpayers, Argentina doesn’t have many of them. “The formal private sector (contributing to taxes) is only eight million people,” reckons our IT guy Manuel Araoz. “The rest of the private sector is six million people working informally.”

They’re off the books and out of the banks. Sensible folk. Araoz goes on: “Twenty million people (50 per cent of the 40 million population) depend on a monthly payment from the state (4.3 million government employees, seven million retired and eight million people who live off social plans).

“Let me say that again because it’s incredible to me: 50 per cent of the population’s livelihood depends on the Argentine state.”

We’re currently at 2,430,400 public sector employees nationwide and counting. Watch that number. Meanwhile, let’s add some postre Balcarce sweetness to this otherwise sour Argentinian dish. The country’s non-slum regions are completely charming. Buenos Aires is more intricate and visually rewarding than Paris. With an average age of just thirty-two, Argentina is impressively energetic.

Our currency goes an enormous way, so get over there, spend up big and help the people. They’ve earned our assistance by helping themselves. Argentina last year elected as president the free-market, small-government advocate Javier Milei, whose January speech to the World Economic Forum set Davos alight.

“Unfortunately, in recent decades, the main leaders of the Western world have abandoned the model of freedom for different versions of what we call collectivism,” Milei said, in probably the only rousing commentary Davos has ever heard. “Some have been motivated by well-meaning individuals who are willing to help others, and others have been motivated by the wish to belong to a privileged caste.

“We’re here to tell you that collectivist experiments are never the solution to the problems that afflict the citizens of the world. Rather, they are the root cause. Do believe me: no one is in a better place than us, Argentines, to testify to these two points.”

President Milei then returned to Buenos Aires where he’d earlier sacked 5000 state employees. Here’s a thought: maybe Australia’s future needn’t be the present beaten and busted Argentina. Possibly, if we learn from mistakes there and here, our future might look more like a revived and restored Argentina.

We’d be free from enforced collectivist “fairness”. Time can’t move quickly enough.