Latest / The You Project / #1761 Printing Money (Literally) - David Gillespie

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#1761 Printing Money (Literally) - David Gillespie · The You Project

0:01
Speaker 1: I'll get a team Craig again here, Stiffany and Cook
0:03
Speaker 1: and David, Brian, Kevin, Patrick Gillespie up there in the
0:06
Speaker 1: bloody Sunshine State with zinc all over him. He's just
0:09
Speaker 1: got out of the pool. He's left his missus in
0:11
Speaker 1: the bloody in the jacuzzi. She's just looking after herself
0:17
Speaker 1: there at Tip High. I don't know what. Do you know?
0:21
Speaker 2: What I had in my head a banana lounge, but
0:23
Speaker 2: I couldn't think of the fucking name for it. You know,
0:27
Speaker 2: it's like my mouth and my brain, they're just in
0:29
Speaker 2: two different locate. Well that literally, but also they weren't
0:33
Speaker 2: SYNCD for that short moment.
0:35
Speaker 3: And not in any way related to reality.
0:39
Speaker 1: That is true. That is true. But you do live
0:41
Speaker 1: in the sun Sunshine State. How are you to?
0:43
Speaker 3: Yeah? Good, I'm at the beach today, but it's not
0:46
Speaker 3: much fun because it's raining. Are you?
0:49
Speaker 1: Are you without giving our way? You know stage secrets?
0:53
Speaker 1: Are you holidaying at the beach for a while or
0:56
Speaker 1: have you just gone to the beach today?
1:00
Speaker 3: I no, No, just holidaying for the Christmas New Year's break.
1:05
Speaker 1: Could you imagine him holidaying tiflate? What do you think
1:08
Speaker 1: he's doing when he's just kicking back research. Yeah, I can't.
1:17
Speaker 1: I'm a little bit like that though. It's like when
1:19
Speaker 1: people go, what are you wouldn't you just love to
1:21
Speaker 1: lie by a pool and do nothing? I go, nah,
1:24
Speaker 1: not at all. I'd like to swim in that pool
1:27
Speaker 1: or swim in the water and then dry off and
1:30
Speaker 1: then do something. But just lying around that doesn't do.
1:34
Speaker 3: It for me. It works for about a minute for me.
1:38
Speaker 1: I think I think all three of us. Have you
1:40
Speaker 1: ever been a sun baker?
1:42
Speaker 3: Oh, back in the day when I was in tazzy
1:45
Speaker 3: hasty is anything. That's why I'll be in all sorts
1:48
Speaker 3: with my skin.
1:49
Speaker 1: I feel like sun baking and tazzy are not kind
1:53
Speaker 1: of in the same sense.
1:55
Speaker 3: Well probably probably really necessary actually to keep your vitamin
1:59
Speaker 3: d up.
2:00
Speaker 1: I was starting from a severe deficit too. You would
2:05
Speaker 1: have been now, gillespo we yesterday we got together and
2:10
Speaker 1: we were going to chat about an article you wrote
2:12
Speaker 1: which was called Beyond the Budget, The Hidden Truth about Money.
2:15
Speaker 1: But Tiff steered us off the beaten track, as she
2:19
Speaker 1: always does. The conversation she left let us into the
2:23
Speaker 1: conversational wilderness, and as she does. But I'm here to
2:30
Speaker 1: get us back on the path today, so we can
2:32
Speaker 1: actually have the conversation that we intended to while I
2:36
Speaker 1: intended to yesterday. So you wrote, you wrote a post.
2:40
Speaker 1: Now don't forget to follow David's on LinkedIn and don't
2:44
Speaker 1: follow him like literally that's creepy, but virtually you can
2:48
Speaker 1: follow him. And it starts with this. Ever, wonder why
2:51
Speaker 1: governments can always find money to buy submarines or bail
2:54
Speaker 1: out banks but struggle to fund social programs. I haven't wondered.
3:00
Speaker 1: How come there seems to be an endless supply of
3:03
Speaker 1: money for certain things? What can you tell us?
3:07
Speaker 3: Okay, so what we're going to talk about today is
3:09
Speaker 3: something that I mean, you might have heard referred to
3:12
Speaker 3: by its initials MMT or maybe even modern monetary theory,
3:19
Speaker 3: or you may not have heard of it at all.
3:21
Speaker 3: But it's something that's been around, probably now for the
3:25
Speaker 3: better part of fifty years, and has become popular in
3:28
Speaker 3: the last probably twenty years, as more and more economists
3:32
Speaker 3: have piled into the argument. Now, normally when you start
3:37
Speaker 3: talking about this kind of stuff, most people's eyes glaze over.
3:40
Speaker 3: I don't want to know about economics. I certainly don't
3:42
Speaker 3: know about currency or any of that sort of stuff.
3:45
Speaker 3: But it's an interesting theory because it kind of blows
3:49
Speaker 3: apart everything you've ever been told about how the national
3:54
Speaker 3: budget works or how we pay for things. And I
3:59
Speaker 3: think the easiest way to think about it is to
4:02
Speaker 3: bring it back to your household. So if you imagine
4:06
Speaker 3: that you, you know, you run a household, and say
4:08
Speaker 3: you've got some kids and you want to motivate them
4:12
Speaker 3: to do things in the household, then you might create
4:16
Speaker 3: a currency, which in the article I call chore bucks,
4:20
Speaker 3: you know, and that might be your business card that
4:23
Speaker 3: you you get hundreds of them printed, and then you
4:27
Speaker 3: might hand out, you know, five of them for mowing
4:31
Speaker 3: the lawn and two of them for doing the washing
4:33
Speaker 3: up and stuff like that. And you'd say to yourself, Okay,
4:36
Speaker 3: well that's all very well and good, but why on
4:38
Speaker 3: earth would the kids bother with that? They don't want
4:40
Speaker 3: five of your business cards. But if you said, okay,
4:44
Speaker 3: the only way you continue to live here is if
4:47
Speaker 3: you pay me rent, And the only currency I will
4:50
Speaker 3: accept for rent is my chore bucks. And if you
4:55
Speaker 3: are the only supplier of the chore bucks, and the
4:58
Speaker 3: only way to get them is to do stuff around
5:01
Speaker 3: the home, then that starts to be a pretty effective
5:04
Speaker 3: mechanism for getting stuff done around the home, in that
5:10
Speaker 3: they have to earn chore bucks in order to continue
5:14
Speaker 3: living there.
5:15
Speaker 1: Now, now we know how the Gillespie household works, Tiff.
5:20
Speaker 1: He's proposing this as some kind of metaphor or theorem.
5:25
Speaker 3: Is describing it.
5:27
Speaker 1: This is actually the Gillespie home one one.
5:34
Speaker 3: So that within your own household, you've effectively invented a currency,
5:40
Speaker 3: the chore bucks currency, and it has value not because
5:43
Speaker 3: of its intrinsic value. I mean, you can't be exchanged
5:45
Speaker 3: for gold or anything, but because you need it to
5:49
Speaker 3: pay for something that you value. So and in doing that,
5:54
Speaker 3: what you've also done is imitate exactly what happens at
5:58
Speaker 3: a national level or any country that creates its own currency.
6:04
Speaker 3: So Australia can create Australian dollars whenever it likes. And
6:11
Speaker 3: how what's the equivalent of making you pay your rent? Well,
6:14
Speaker 3: it's called tax. The only way you can pay tax
6:17
Speaker 3: in Australia is in Australian dollars. The only way you're
6:20
Speaker 3: going to have Australian dollars to pay tax is to
6:22
Speaker 3: do something to earn Australian dollars and so you might think, oh, yeah,
6:27
Speaker 3: but the whole economy is much more complicated than that.
6:30
Speaker 3: But at the end of the day, it really does
6:31
Speaker 3: boil down to us that which is Australian currency is
6:36
Speaker 3: entirely made up. Now in economics speak, that's called the
6:39
Speaker 3: fiat currency, which is the Australian currency is not based
6:44
Speaker 3: on anything. There's not a big mountain of gold anywhere
6:47
Speaker 3: that you can exchange Australian dollars for. We don't have
6:51
Speaker 3: Fort Knox in Canberra somewhere. It's entirely made up, and
6:56
Speaker 3: it's made up at the stroke of a keyboard. Buy
7:00
Speaker 3: the government who says how much we need every day.
7:04
Speaker 1: Now.
7:04
Speaker 3: A lot of people might find this a pretty bizarre
7:06
Speaker 3: idea because mostly of things the government says, which is
7:10
Speaker 3: they constantly talk about keeping their budget in balance, like
7:14
Speaker 3: they're talking about a household checkbook that they've got to
7:16
Speaker 3: keep balanced. They're constantly talking about not being able to
7:19
Speaker 3: afford things, which isn't a nonsense when you can print
7:24
Speaker 3: your own money. So that would be like me with
7:27
Speaker 3: my cholbucks when my kids say, well, you know, we
7:33
Speaker 3: want you to purchase something within the house and me saying, oh,
7:36
Speaker 3: I don't have enough choll bucks. That's rubbish. I can
7:40
Speaker 3: create as many as I want. The problem comes if
7:43
Speaker 3: I have to go to Bunnings and buy something to
7:45
Speaker 3: do in the house. They're not going to accept chore bucks.
7:48
Speaker 3: I'm going to need to have some other form of
7:51
Speaker 3: currency that they will accept. And that's what happens on
7:53
Speaker 3: a world stage too. If Australian wants to go and
7:56
Speaker 3: buy something from someone who doesn't accept Australian dollars, then
8:00
Speaker 3: we might have to buy exchange some of our Australian
8:03
Speaker 3: dollars for US dollars or something like that. And so
8:06
Speaker 3: outside the country it becomes problematic. But inside the country,
8:11
Speaker 3: there is no limit to how much Australian currency we
8:14
Speaker 3: can create. The only problem is, of course, just like
8:18
Speaker 3: with the chore bucks thing, I could devalue chore bucks
8:23
Speaker 3: by creating too many of them, you know, and then
8:26
Speaker 3: there'd be chore bucks inflation. I could say, well, I'm
8:31
Speaker 3: giving ten for mowing the lawn instead of five like
8:34
Speaker 3: it was last week, and then the purchasing power of
8:36
Speaker 3: those things drops, yes, and I would probably have to
8:40
Speaker 3: increase the rent in chore bucks to increase the purchasing power.
8:44
Speaker 3: So well, that's really really complicated, But I guess the
8:47
Speaker 3: message I'm trying to get across is there is no
8:50
Speaker 3: limit to the amount of Australian currency available in Australia.
8:55
Speaker 3: It's a limit determined entirely by our government. And the
8:59
Speaker 3: only thing potentially limiting it is if you print too
9:03
Speaker 3: much money and put it into circulation, the end result
9:06
Speaker 3: will be the price of everything goes up, Yes, because
9:10
Speaker 3: you need a wheelbarrow full of chore bucks to buy anything,
9:13
Speaker 3: or you need a real barrow full of Australian dollars
9:15
Speaker 3: to buy anything, because there's so many of them in
9:17
Speaker 3: circulation that the price goes up. So that's the only
9:24
Speaker 3: real limiting factor. And we've seen that actually happen recently
9:28
Speaker 3: with the COVID nineteen epidemic. When the government printed money.
9:33
Speaker 3: Now they called it quantitative easing, which is fancy economics
9:37
Speaker 3: speak for printing money, and.
9:40
Speaker 4: What did they call it? What they call it? Quantitative
9:43
Speaker 4: dative easing? The fuck it's like it to get to
9:49
Speaker 4: explain it to you later, Craig, Can you explain it
9:54
Speaker 4: to me when we get off.
9:57
Speaker 3: So anyway, they printed money, and the reason they printed money.
10:00
Speaker 3: Is that they had to hand out billions and billions
10:02
Speaker 3: of dollars in social welfare payments that they previously hadn't
10:05
Speaker 3: been prepared to because everybody was suddenly unemployed because of
10:08
Speaker 3: the COVID restrictions. So they created job Keeper and all
10:12
Speaker 3: those sorts of things. They double the amount of unemployment
10:16
Speaker 3: benefits being paid. They massively increased the amount of social
10:21
Speaker 3: welfare being paid across the board, both to companies and
10:25
Speaker 3: to employees. All that, where did the money come from that?
10:30
Speaker 3: For from that, was there a warehouse full of trillions
10:32
Speaker 3: of dollars that they had forgot to mention before when
10:34
Speaker 3: they were doing the budget. No, they printed it. And
10:39
Speaker 3: the end result is that we got a massive rise
10:43
Speaker 3: in inflation. Last year. You might remember, inflation went to
10:46
Speaker 3: about seven percent when it had historically been you know,
10:49
Speaker 3: less than two percent. So that's the price you pay
10:52
Speaker 3: when you pump a whole lot of new money into
10:54
Speaker 3: the economy, is if inflation goes up. And what we're
10:58
Speaker 3: doing now is, you know, earn that back down again.
11:01
Speaker 3: So I guess the takeaway from all of that is
11:06
Speaker 3: that if the money can create, if the government can
11:09
Speaker 3: create money anytime, it wants to do whatever it wants.
11:12
Speaker 3: Why don't they talk that way? You know, why why
11:18
Speaker 3: do we not hear this explanation? Why do we always
11:22
Speaker 3: hear when someone wants to do something like, say increase
11:26
Speaker 3: social welfare or or you know, increase the availability of
11:32
Speaker 3: say Medicare to the population, or maybe put dentistry on
11:36
Speaker 3: medicare or something like that, any of those things, any
11:39
Speaker 3: of the community benefits. Why is the answer always we
11:42
Speaker 3: can't afford it. And then they point to the budget
11:44
Speaker 3: and say, look see we're in deficit. We can't afford it,
11:47
Speaker 3: like it's a household checkbook. Now, if you're a state government,
11:50
Speaker 3: this is true. A state government cannot print its own currency.
11:55
Speaker 3: The only place it can get chore bucks from is
11:57
Speaker 3: from Dad, I eat. The federal government, so they must
12:01
Speaker 3: run a balanced budget, even though they don't manage to.
12:05
Speaker 1: Most of the time.
12:07
Speaker 3: And it is like a household checkbook. They have to
12:10
Speaker 3: keep balance. They only have as much money coming in
12:12
Speaker 3: as the government gives them.
12:14
Speaker 1: But for the.
12:14
Speaker 3: Federal government, who can print their own currency, there are
12:18
Speaker 3: no such limitations, and you see them every now and
12:21
Speaker 3: then expose that. They pull back the curtain anytime they
12:24
Speaker 3: need to spend big, say something like buying some submarines,
12:29
Speaker 3: or in the COVID nineteen epidemic they find the money.
12:34
Speaker 3: Now they don't have it stored in a warehouse, they
12:36
Speaker 3: just make it. The big question is why can't we
12:41
Speaker 3: have an open conversation about that. Why can't we talk
12:45
Speaker 3: about the fact that, yes, there are limits on this.
12:49
Speaker 3: You put too much money into the economy and you
12:51
Speaker 3: will get inflation. But why can't we have an open
12:55
Speaker 3: conversation based on what we all want to afford, or
12:59
Speaker 3: what we think the community they should afford for the
13:02
Speaker 3: of the community, rather than pretending we have no choice
13:07
Speaker 3: because we can't afford it, and then suddenly magically being
13:10
Speaker 3: able to buy things when the government wants to buy them.
13:14
Speaker 1: And what I'm sure you have an answer to that question.
13:16
Speaker 1: Good question. What's the answer? What's the answer? The answer
13:21
Speaker 1: is fear.
13:22
Speaker 3: I think a lot of people in power don't think that. Well,
13:28
Speaker 3: they think that if they explained it that way to
13:31
Speaker 3: the rest of us, hoypolloy, we'd start wanting all sorts
13:35
Speaker 3: of things. You know, you know, we'd probably want free
13:38
Speaker 3: healthcare or you know, things like that. We'd probably education,
13:44
Speaker 3: would probably want all these things for the community, and
13:47
Speaker 3: then they wouldn't have enough money to spend on submarines
13:51
Speaker 3: and whatever they want. They prefer the conversation to be
13:56
Speaker 3: in terms that all of us understand in our own
14:00
Speaker 3: economic terms, which is, there's a budget and we have
14:03
Speaker 3: to stick to it, and we can't make money. I
14:06
Speaker 3: think we have to have a more mature conversation about
14:10
Speaker 3: what we can afford on the basis of an understanding
14:14
Speaker 3: because we see this and it's not just in Australia,
14:16
Speaker 3: like all fiat currencies do this. The United States for example.
14:20
Speaker 3: You know, did it find a stockpile of trillions of
14:25
Speaker 3: dollars before it decided to invade a rack? No it didn't.
14:29
Speaker 3: It just printed money. And then we can have a
14:33
Speaker 3: sensible conversation in this nation about what we want to
14:36
Speaker 3: afford and what the limits of affording it are. Not
14:40
Speaker 3: some nonsense about whether or not the checkbook is balanced,
14:43
Speaker 3: but what should we be affording?
14:47
Speaker 1: MM when you okay, a couple of things. One so
14:51
Speaker 1: just specific to COVID, for example, like there was billions
14:55
Speaker 1: of dollars handed out, you know, for good and perhaps
15:00
Speaker 1: not so good reasons that and that money just came
15:02
Speaker 1: from wherever they're not literally printing the money, right because
15:08
Speaker 1: when people are getting the money, it's they're just electronic deposits.
15:11
Speaker 1: So yeah, so they're not literally but like where is that? Like,
15:18
Speaker 1: so there is no more necessarily, no more dollars per
15:22
Speaker 1: se in circulation in terms of physical money. But they're
15:26
Speaker 1: just like how do I like? That messes with my head?
15:30
Speaker 1: Like they're just the film.
15:32
Speaker 3: The money is a very very small part of the money,
15:35
Speaker 3: you know, the currency. Yeah, yeah, I mean, and it's
15:38
Speaker 3: just a mechanism available for transacting. There's lots of mechanisms
15:43
Speaker 3: available for transacting. Most of the transacting most of us
15:46
Speaker 3: do isn't with physical money. Most of us, you know,
15:50
Speaker 3: put things on credit cards or buy things with our
15:53
Speaker 3: debit card. We've never that, we've never seen the money.
15:56
Speaker 3: Our employer changed a balance in our bank account and
16:01
Speaker 3: then it got changed again by our credit card. You know,
16:05
Speaker 3: it's all it's all just a journal entry. None of
16:07
Speaker 3: it is actual real you know, a dollar bill or
16:10
Speaker 3: something not that there is such a thing, or one
16:12
Speaker 3: hundred dollars bill. None of that ever went anywhere near
16:16
Speaker 3: any of that system. So you know, you've got to
16:21
Speaker 3: divorce yourself from the thought of it being physical money,
16:25
Speaker 3: and in my chour bucks example, rather than it being
16:27
Speaker 3: my business cards, it might just be a ledger that
16:30
Speaker 3: I maintained.
16:31
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, And I guess also, I mean, as
16:34
Speaker 1: you said, within the within a national context, like within
16:38
Speaker 1: the walls of Australia from one of the better term
16:40
Speaker 1: or the borders of Australia, we can kind of just
16:44
Speaker 1: print money, if not literally, but when it comes to
16:50
Speaker 1: trading with other countries or buying submarines from, well, all this.
16:56
Speaker 3: Money ultimately has to come back to something we're capable
16:59
Speaker 3: of producing. I mean, you can be a micro island
17:04
Speaker 3: nation with no resources and nothing that anyone wants to buy,
17:08
Speaker 3: and you can bring as much money as you like,
17:10
Speaker 3: but if there's no value standing behind it, then that's
17:13
Speaker 3: kind of irrelevant. And the value that Australia has standing
17:16
Speaker 3: behind its money is the resources that it's digging out
17:19
Speaker 3: of the ground all of the time.
17:21
Speaker 1: That's kind of what happened with Zimbabwe, right. I think
17:26
Speaker 1: it was Zimbabwe a while ago where maybe five years ago,
17:29
Speaker 1: where they're dollar like it was like a million dollars
17:32
Speaker 1: to buy a loaf of bread or something.
17:36
Speaker 3: Yeah, it is, and it's exactly the same as what
17:39
Speaker 3: happened in Germany just before the Second World War, where
17:43
Speaker 3: inflation went into the thousands of percent. You needed a
17:46
Speaker 3: wheel You literally needed a wheelbarrow full of marks to
17:49
Speaker 3: buy a loaf of bread. Yes, and so yeah, that
17:54
Speaker 3: can be the consequence, but that's not a real risk
17:59
Speaker 3: where it's being managed properly and discussed properly.
18:03
Speaker 1: So it becomes it becomes a real problem. Though, when
18:06
Speaker 1: you live in Zimbabwe, for this example, and you're a millionaire,
18:10
Speaker 1: which literally makes you rich, then all of a sudden,
18:14
Speaker 1: your dollar is now worth one cent of what it was.
18:18
Speaker 1: If that yeah, and were.
18:21
Speaker 3: We to have a situation where a government decided to
18:26
Speaker 3: quadruple or you know, or multiply by one hundred the
18:30
Speaker 3: size of the money pool, then the value of each
18:33
Speaker 3: dollar drops to the value of a cent, and you
18:39
Speaker 3: do need one hundred dollars to spend a dollar. But
18:42
Speaker 3: that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about
18:47
Speaker 3: readjusting the priorities for expenditure based on an adult conversation
18:52
Speaker 3: about what we as a community want to spend our
18:54
Speaker 3: money on, rather than simply talking about whether or not
19:00
Speaker 3: we can afford it. As if there's some sort of
19:03
Speaker 3: limit on what we can afford.
19:07
Speaker 1: Welza.
19:09
Speaker 3: Well, now the other part of this, by the way,
19:11
Speaker 3: is that you can use this as a mechanism for
19:16
Speaker 3: managing unemployment. So if you go back to our little
19:20
Speaker 3: household example, say there's something where say you've got one
19:25
Speaker 3: kid who has some time on his hands, and you've
19:29
Speaker 3: got a project that you want done in the house,
19:32
Speaker 3: then you might offer you a job guarantee where you
19:36
Speaker 3: give him extra money to get that thing done. So
19:41
Speaker 3: in the real world economy, this is called the job guarantee,
19:44
Speaker 3: where you're essentially saying the government, the maker of the money,
19:49
Speaker 3: will employ anyone who wants a job, remembering there's no
19:52
Speaker 3: limit on how much money they can print to pay
19:54
Speaker 3: that person. Then they can use that that additional labor
19:59
Speaker 3: pool to create things of value in the economy. So
20:03
Speaker 3: this was last done in the depression, where things like
20:06
Speaker 3: bridges and so on were created by government's employed workforces,
20:11
Speaker 3: where they created a workforce just as a way of
20:15
Speaker 3: putting money into the hands of workers, and the same
20:19
Speaker 3: thing could happen as part of our economy. There need
20:23
Speaker 3: not be unemployment. We have unemployment because the government chooses
20:27
Speaker 3: to have unemployment. There's nothing to stop them simply saying.
20:32
Speaker 3: What we will do is anyone who wants a job
20:35
Speaker 3: can have one working for the government on this infrastructure
20:39
Speaker 3: project or this thing that adds value to the nation.
20:44
Speaker 1: How do we I don't know if you know the
20:47
Speaker 1: answer to this, but in a global sense, how do
20:49
Speaker 1: we go as a country in terms of managing our economy,
20:54
Speaker 1: managing our money in the like are we good? Are
20:57
Speaker 1: we good at this compared to other countries? Are we terrible?
21:01
Speaker 3: I don't know. I don't know how you'd measure that.
21:03
Speaker 3: I mean, people don't tend to measure internal things within
21:07
Speaker 3: countries across countries, so they tend to measure there's sort
21:12
Speaker 3: of a fairly raw measurement called a GDP or gross
21:16
Speaker 3: domestic product, which is the full financial total financial output
21:21
Speaker 3: of the economy. And Australia that's above its way for that,
21:25
Speaker 3: mostly because we dig out a lot of stuff and
21:28
Speaker 3: sell it, whereas other countries actually have to take stuff
21:32
Speaker 3: that they've bought from someone else and add value to it,
21:34
Speaker 3: you know, like Germany has a heavy manufacturing, heavy engineering
21:38
Speaker 3: economy where they're taking in raw materials and turning it
21:41
Speaker 3: into something that's more valuable like the MW's and Mercedes.
21:45
Speaker 3: So we have a relatively simple task, which is dig
21:49
Speaker 3: stuff out of the ground and sell it. But there
21:52
Speaker 3: are limits to that in that when the people who
21:54
Speaker 3: are buying it no longer want to pay as much
21:57
Speaker 3: for it, then we are going to have trouble.
22:02
Speaker 1: I don't know why I thought of this, but just
22:04
Speaker 1: around this conversation seems to me like Singapore would be
22:09
Speaker 1: batting way above its class, if you know what I
22:12
Speaker 1: mean in terms of like minimal resources. But aren't they
22:16
Speaker 1: world leaders in tech? Yeah?
22:18
Speaker 3: But see a lot of country they developed their specialization,
22:22
Speaker 3: you know, So countries developed specializations in the provision of services,
22:26
Speaker 3: for example. And one of the big things that Australia
22:29
Speaker 3: exports is not something we dig out of the ground.
22:31
Speaker 3: It's our education system. So we sell overseas students places
22:36
Speaker 3: in our universities and that's a very valuable export to Australia.
22:42
Speaker 3: It's one that didn't exist forty years ago. So you
22:45
Speaker 3: know what country specialize in. You know, it's a market
22:49
Speaker 3: dynamic thing. But that's as between countries, and I guess
22:54
Speaker 3: I want to steer the conversation back to rethinking the
22:57
Speaker 3: way we think about internal to our country, which is,
23:02
Speaker 3: don't fall for this story about we can't afford this,
23:09
Speaker 3: because the message is we don't want to afford this.
23:14
Speaker 3: That's what you've got to hear. Every time a government
23:16
Speaker 3: says we can't afford this, what they are actually saying
23:19
Speaker 3: is we don't want to afford this. There's no such
23:22
Speaker 3: thing as can't when you can make as many chore
23:25
Speaker 3: bucks as you want.
23:28
Speaker 1: So what is the average? I mean, but there's nothing
23:31
Speaker 1: that me and Tiff can do about this. Right when
23:34
Speaker 1: you say don't fall for it? Yeah? Cool? But then
23:36
Speaker 1: what it's like. I guess the.
23:39
Speaker 3: More people that understand this about our economy, the less
23:44
Speaker 3: people are going to be snowed by it, the less
23:47
Speaker 3: people are going to accept explanations that simply don't make sense.
23:52
Speaker 3: And at the moment, to the extent any of us
23:54
Speaker 3: think about it.
23:55
Speaker 1: We probably buy that line.
23:57
Speaker 3: You know. Oh well, yeah, I guess we we can't
24:00
Speaker 3: have decent health care or or decent education just as
24:05
Speaker 3: we can't afford it. Well, I guess we'll just have
24:07
Speaker 3: to work harder. When that's not entirely true.
24:12
Speaker 1: It's really it's really just I mean, not just, but
24:15
Speaker 1: it's it's about being informed and aware and understanding what
24:20
Speaker 1: actually is versus the story.
24:23
Speaker 3: Yeah, if the if the general conversation among the population,
24:28
Speaker 3: If most of us have an understanding of how this
24:30
Speaker 3: really works, and we can't be bullshitted about.
24:34
Speaker 1: It, yeah, wow, less both swears, Well, we can't.
24:38
Speaker 3: And it makes me angry. Every time I hear a
24:41
Speaker 3: politician say we can't afford something, it makes me angry
24:45
Speaker 3: because that's not the discussion we should be having. The
24:48
Speaker 3: discussion we should be having is we don't want to
24:50
Speaker 3: afford that, and we'd rather spend the money on this.
24:54
Speaker 1: Yeah, and we're telling you we can't afford it because
24:59
Speaker 1: that's a good piece move. Yeah.
25:01
Speaker 3: And the less of a school for that, the more
25:04
Speaker 3: likely it is that we'll be able to have an
25:05
Speaker 3: intelligent conversation about it. It's particularly when it comes to
25:09
Speaker 3: voting for people.
25:10
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, no, it makes sense. I've never thought at all.
25:15
Speaker 1: Have you ever thought about that, tiff?
25:17
Speaker 3: Nah? It makes my brain hurt. The economy it is
25:20
Speaker 3: shouldn't because it's really simple, that bit of it is.
25:24
Speaker 3: But all your explanations they give us are not simple.
25:27
Speaker 3: They're very, very complicated.
25:30
Speaker 1: But you know, like what you're saying it makes me
25:35
Speaker 1: quite a lot of things make me feel dumb, but
25:36
Speaker 1: makes well. It doesn't make me feel dumb. It makes
25:38
Speaker 1: me feel very unaware because I'm like, yeah, well, everyone
25:43
Speaker 1: is affected. I mean this is relevant, Like this conversation
25:47
Speaker 1: and the use of money, allocation of money, and the
25:50
Speaker 1: reality of the economy and the reality of what can
25:55
Speaker 1: and can't be spent and how and where and when.
25:58
Speaker 1: This affects every person in Australia. Yeah. Absolutely, But we
26:03
Speaker 1: just don't know this, and so yeah, this is you
26:06
Speaker 1: as you do, pulling back the curtain yet again.
26:09
Speaker 3: Well, it's keeping us in the dark and feeding as bullshit, right,
26:13
Speaker 3: it's saying it's saying to us, be good little mushrooms.
26:19
Speaker 3: Sit over there and believe me when I say that
26:22
Speaker 3: I'd love to do this thing. I'd love to fund
26:24
Speaker 3: our health system properly. I'd love to find our education
26:26
Speaker 3: system properly. But oh dear me, I just can't because
26:29
Speaker 3: we can't afford it.
26:32
Speaker 1: I think we're going to call it good little mushrooms tip.
26:34
Speaker 1: I'm just writing it down, good little mushrooms glasspo as always,
26:41
Speaker 1: I'm just finishing that mushrooms informative. Make sure you're slipping
26:47
Speaker 1: slapping and slapping up there in the Sunshine State, and
26:51
Speaker 1: I don't want you to have to get all the
26:53
Speaker 1: shit cut off your skin that I've had cut off
26:55
Speaker 1: over the last.
26:56
Speaker 3: Few years of well you're healing, well, thanks.
27:00
Speaker 1: Have you had any any cutoff?
27:02
Speaker 3: Yeah? Yeah, and I've had I had one cut off
27:04
Speaker 3: my forehead that was borderline, but I just you know,
27:09
Speaker 3: went in doubt. Chop it off, is my view.
27:12
Speaker 1: I agree, we'll say goodbye fair but mate, thank you
27:15
Speaker 1: yet again.
27:16
Speaker 3: Yeah, absolute pleasure. Good to see you by.
27:17
Speaker 1: Thanks, Thanks buddy,