The DOGE-esque plan to save $90 billion

Flat White I 8 February 2025 I Spectator Australia

We have been asking for some Trumpian politics, and perhaps we have found it in a press conference yesterday.

One Nation Senators Pauline Hanson and Malcolm Roberts joined forces to announce a plot to put ‘$40 billion back into Australian pockets’.

It was a crowd-pleasing batch of policies that included halving the fuel excise and ‘slashing energy bills by 20 per cent’. They also proposed a list of tax reforms, particularly raising the tax-free threshold for self-funded retirees.

For the conservative base, that last one is a big deal. Those who are still able to work and want to, especially grandparents seeking to help their family with the cost of living crisis, have found themselves shackled by a greedy and unfair tax system. Many complain that the tax scale for retirees seems designed to trap them in a cruel state of survivable poverty, punishing them if they seek to improve their financial position.

Media outlets have credited Elon Musk’s DOGE campaign for this suite of policies.

As Pauline Hanson wrote on X yesterday: ‘Labor and the Liberals have run this country into the ground with reckless spending and bad policies. It’s time for real reform. One Nation has a plan to slash government waste by up to $90 billion a year, put $40 billion back into your pockets, and invest in infrastructure that actually benefits Australians.’

Is it really such an impossible dream?

The revelations coming out of America are frightening. Not worrying or a little bit concerning.?Frightening.

For decades, American taxpayer money has been used to fund what can only be described as an anti-Enlightenment globalist revolution. The swamp has been filled from a thousand idiotic rivers flowing out of the Treasury under the cover of USAID.

In addition to tearing up most of its Woke projects, Trump plans to reduce the US Agency of International Development from 10,000 employees to 294.

Some accounts on X have been detailing the extent of this wasteful spending including (but certainly not limited to):

$7.9 million to teach Sri Lankan journalists how to avoid ‘binary-gendered language’.

$20 million for a Sesame Street show in Iraq.

$2 million for sex changes and LGBT activism in Guatemala.

$6 million to transform digital spaces to reflect feminist democratic principles.

USAID likes to use the ‘humanitarian’ branding to conceal a wide range of conceited activism at odds with what the majority of Americans believe.

Over 130 nations receive money from USAID but the top ten are: Ukraine, Ethiopia, Jordan, Congo, Somalia, Yemen, Afghanistan, Nigeria, South Sudan, and Syria.

Most of these nations are going backwards.

Countries such as Nigeria are already re-structuring their finances to fill the gap left by USAID and let’s be honest, it might force their regimes to be more responsible.

Many Americans feel that if their aid money cannot be used constructively then it should not be given at all. Americans need their money spent domestically – on the Blue State zombie drug crisis, on border security, on energy, and even on the apocalyptic frontier of California.

Watching this story play out, Australians have slowly shifted their attention to the colossal Indigenous industry and the tens of billions of dollars that vanish without lifting rural communities out of third-world standards.

Australians want a DOGE. They want the Treasury to open its books and for someone like Musk to go line-by-line through every cheque. The social media flurry over One Nation’s announcement is because voters recognise these same problems at home. America uses USAID to extend soft power over the third world, to no real benefit. Australia uses humanitarian and Net Zero grant money in the Pacific as a form of soft power to lure the islands away from China. And it is not working. Paying for Peace, as a concept, has failed because free cash breeds corruption and corruption rarely brews loyalty.

It wasn’t so long ago that $500 million vanished into the Great Barrier Reef. Snowy 2.0 is set to cost $12 billion. Last year we gave $2 billion to the Pacific in one set of projects. In December, Albanese handed PNG $380 million for an NRL team. Between 2021-22, government collectively funded the arts with $8.3 billion. How many national treasurers did we get out of that?

Senator Malcolm Roberts said, ‘We anticipate saving about $1 billion a year by withdrawing Australia’s participation from the United Nations, UN Refugee Convention, World Health Organisation, World Economic Forum, International Criminal Court, and other global bodies which threaten Australia’s foreign aid spending to where it will make a difference, saving up to $3 billion, and review and reduce funding for arts and mulitcultural programs. We must withdraw from the Paris Agreement.’

And naturally, some of this would be used to pay off the Treasury debt and reduce the wasted interest payments.

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton tried to emulate Trump with his appointment of Jacinta Nampijinpa Price to Shadow Minister for Government Efficiency.

There is no doubt that Senator Price will wade into the swamp with the same enthusiasm as Elon Musk, but she will be weighed down by the international bureaucracies Dutton refuses to pull out of.

These unelected organisations serve as the glue that makes domestic corruption stick.

There can be no efficiency while our international commitments remain in place. It would be like trying to achieve free speech in China by sacking Xi Jinping and leaving the CCP in power.

Author: Flat White

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