Dr Nick Coatsworth

speaker

831 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 22 Jul

Dr Nick Coatsworth’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Straight Talk with Mark Bouris · Dr Nick Coatsworth: COVID Mistakes, Big Government & The Future of Australia · 22 Jul 2026 podcast

The third one used to be a very clear measure, which was governments had a certain – we didn't have a debt ceiling like the US, but we had a charter of budget honesty and a notional percentage of GDP that we would take into government coffers, which has, as you know, been blown out.

So I would suggest to you that on those three measures –

We're actually failing because standard of living is measurably going backwards relative to both our own standard of living and the OECD.

We don't seem to be able to have government programs that adequately balance each other.

And the NDIS aged care health care example is a good one.

So one of those three should not be paying for one of the others.

Two shouldn't be paying for one.

That's right.

And the third one is that the relative proportion of government expenditure as a proportion of GDP is too high.

It's at an all-time record.

than has ever been spent as a percentage in our history now what happens when we go out of balance because I think we are out of balance

When you've got lots of money in big pots, whether it's private, especially when it's government, you start getting leakage, you start getting fraud.

We see that with the NDIS, but the other really big one that we see at the moment is what's going on with building bad down in Victoria and the big build.

What we call is borderland corruption.

$15 billion, and I know I'm doing a shameless plug for the conspiracy cabal, but we do have an episode on this where we interview Nick McKenzie from The Age, who's blown the lid on this, and it is a fascinating insight into what happens when the worlds of politics, organized crime, business change.

intersect together in a Venn diagram that is far too overlapping.

Now, in a democracy, you don't want that organized crime circle.

You never want it overlapping.

And right at the start, we talked about corruption in sub-Saharan Africa.

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