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I don’t mean to pick on Jessica Irvine but her recent output aimed at generating sympathy for the Reserve Bank of Australia has left me so agog that it’s time we pan back and survey the state of truth itself in Australian discourse.

For those that missed it, yesterday Ms Irvine slapped down a slurping pile of tripe about an impending turn in Aussie pay packets based upon RBA thinking, instead of acknowledging that the income smash is the worst in seventy years and that all evidence suggests it will get worse before it gets better. This followed a nauseating string of articles praising the RBA for manfully doing a great job against the odds, somehow forgetting that it is an enormously well-funded and bastioned institutional titan with the fantastically simple job of deciding on interest rates once per month. We can only conclude that Ms Irvine is grooming the RBA. She wants access and only a bit of friendly brand polishing will give it to her.

This attitude is my point this morning. It’s a behaviour of getting ahead no matter the cost, of ignoring one’s role in the political economy lest there be personal cost, of pretending that Australian institutions are unimpeachable, that we’re exceptional, and to criticise it even as it falls apart makes you a “doomsayer”. It is part of such a towering edifice of economic lies that it is kind of hard to fathom how the Hell it was constructed.

Let’s just run through where we are from the top down.

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  1. We have Prime Minister that built his public career on rational and progressive policy but is now heading a troglodyte policy platform aimed at protecting rent seekers in property and the big end of town. Thus, he either lied his way to the top or he is lying now because he likes being PM. Worse, today he even lies about his own lies, claiming that he was never progressive to begin with.
  2. His right hand man, Treasurer Scott Morrison, is the former head of research at the Property Council of Australia – that is, a professional liar – and now lies daily about the Turnbull policy platform in aid of his previous employer.
  3. Both men have produced a Budget so hopelessly riddled with lies that three weeks into the 2016/17 year it is a laughing stock as iron ore falls, income misses, nominal growth undershoots and business investment slides away. The Treasury that did the work on the same budget issued an unprecedented disclaimer about it as it did so, effectively admitting it had itself lied, and rendering the Budget a tome of lies.
  4. At the heart of the Budget of Lies was another lie, produced by the Department of Industry Office of the Chief Economist, fantasy commodity price outlooks upon which the Budget could rely.
  5. The Opposition has failed to call out the Government on these lies and has failed as well to describe to the nation the mounting challenge confronting it. Bill Shorten prefers to lie about how he’ll right the ship without widespread sacrifice.
  6. Thus the election itself is a lie, a choice between a pack of lying carpet baggers on one hand and the false promises of a cunning political operator on the other.
  7. Turning to the RBA, it lies relentlessly as it strives vainly to balance out an economic structure hopelessly dependent upon mortgage borrowing and house prices that it itself created. I could go on but its most recent lie is evidence enough; the absurdity that it does not currently have an easing bias even as inflation craters in a most unprecedented and disconcerting manner. It has a monstrous easing bias, it just can’t say so because it’s afraid it will trigger more housing speculation. As such it only guarantees it will fail by driving up the currency.
  8. The RBA’s partner in crime, the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) is the nation’s one hope of getting out from under the RBA’s lies. Only APRA can tighten macroprudential policy enough to free the RBA to cut rates further. But nobody knows what it’s thinking or doing. We don’t even know if it knows. It’s an enigma wrapped in mystery captured by the banks. That APRA is a functional macro manager is a total lie. We could add ASIC which failed to prevent various bank abuses but is now supposedly equipped to prosecute the same failure.
  9. Then there’s the media which has neither the brains nor desire to actually address any of the above in a systematic and national interest manner. It’s too busy with Eddie McGuire’s big mouth or with selling one party or the other for its own benefit.
  10. Finally, there’s the business and union lies; the plague of rent seeker campaigns that employ lying economists at every turn to justify other lies to benefit themselves.

I know we’re in an election campaign and a certain mount of “truth as the first casualty” can be expected but this goes way beyond that. Every one of the above lies begets another as each poisons the policy-making center that little bit more, disenfranchising more people and triggering their own justifiable lies to get ahead.

It is institutional sclerosis on a grand scale; real end of empire stuff.

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About the author
David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal. He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.