Rudd Calls for More Regulation

News.com.au reports that Kevin Rudd has had enough time over the past few months to write a 7000 word essay on the end of the free market in Australia. In the new work, it is claimed, he declares "a new era of re-regulation". "The time has come, off the back of the current crisis, to proclaim that the great neo-liberal experiment of the past 30 years has failed, that the emperor has no clothes", he is quoted as saying, "Ironically, it falls to social democracy to prevent liberal capitalism from cannibalising itself."

Now, it is all well and good to produce a document reaffirming what has been labor party policy since day one, but I wonder if he could have better timed the release of this statement. It comes as businesses all over Australia are trying to refinance loans. I wonder how foreign investors will feel about lending money to Australian companies when our prime minister has just announced a new era of regulation, without specifying details.

Making an unqualified statement that you will soon increase regulation merely introduces a new cost; regulatory risk; which will have to be priced into the financial markets and loans made by foreign investors to Australian companies. It is beginning to look like very poorly thought out communications strategy from the PM's office.