Dear Treasurer,
Now that messy, democratic bye-election thingy is out of the way and you can get back onto your day job, I just thought I would drop you a line to help you refocus on the budgetary problems you inherited from your high-flying predecessors.
As an economist and the treasurer of a government that is embarrassed by an anti-smoking organisation that actually turns out to be anti-smoking, it must perplex you that government is not embarrassed by spending billions of dollars it does not have.
Your job is made harder by your predecessors basing their budget revenue on record high mineral prices. It is the budget equivalent of a family having a win at the races and then permanently raising their mortgage repayment levels.
Only the hare-brained would act like that; but your predecessors not only did it, they went one humongous step further and maxxed out the state's credit card and now you have to find a way to pay for it all.
But enough of that; the upside for taxpayers is that you know what needs to be done - after all, you have been telling governments how to fix these things for years.
Mike, remember all those Institute of Public Affairs papers about smaller government being better; how lower taxes stimulate economies and how privatisation can lift the level of service and lower costs?
Well, champ, now is the time for you to step up and put it all into action.
It wasn't so hard when your mob were writing those papers, so it shouldn't be difficult for you to implement your own suggestions and you could start by privatising the electricity system.
Better than most, you understand that if you set up a genuinely competitive market place, it will work to hold down electricity costs. Even better the government will no longer have to bail out the "bloated" energy utilities that it owns.
Those utilities are eating up taxpayers' money and if you sold them you would probably get $8-10 billion. You better get on with it because, every year you delay the inevitable, the price goes down.
And by the way, the proceeds from that one step would probably pay enough off the state's debt that you might even get that AAA credit rating re-instated.
The Fiona Stanley Hospital is now up and running, so you could close Royal Perth Hospital.
Even though the new hospital cost around twice as much as it was forecast to and was finished two years late, it is now there and it is a bit silly to have two hospitals when you can't afford to run one properly. So why not get rid of the old one?
Selling the land that RPH sits on would raise squillions that you could use to reduce more of the debt.
Until the casino owners and the AFL kick in a quid to two, you could stop all the work on new footy stadium. Those folks are all cashed up and can afford it, and you can't. So if they don't kick in – you don't finish it and that is another lazy billion or so saved.
Elizabeth Quay could be sold to the Royal family or anyone else who wants to buy it and you would then be able to stop pouring taxpayers money into yet another luxury that you can't afford.
To entrench some real reform, you could always use some of the more talented parliamentary backbenchers to carry out functional reviews on government departments. If you don't have any talented backbenchers, some by-elections could quickly fix that.
You need to take steps like this because functional reviews attack empire building - you know that evil cancer that always grows inside governments and costs a mozza?
A serious functional review would cost you little, but it could save you hundreds of millions of dollars every year.
But whatever you do – the party is over and because the credit card bill has arrived, you know you have to start walking the walk.
So Treasurer, why not be brave, or even courageous, and fix the problems without shifting the cost of your mate's bungling onto the public?
Go on Mike, you can do it, you know you can. After all, you are the WA Treasurer and a very senior member of the only political party that believes in small government, private enterprise, low taxes and low debt!
And those things are what people want from you, so implementing the ideology of your party should be a doddle.
Surely no one on your side of politics could object.
Why would they?
After all it is what they believe in - isn't it?
