Here is Jim “chicken” Chalmers again late yesterday:
Australia is not immune to a recession amid a struggling global economy, according to Jim Chalmers.
“We won’t be completely immune from that… Our expectation is that the Australian economy will continue to grow, but so will the challenges to the Australian economy.”
Addressing problems with skills shortages, supply chains, inflation and wage growth will be key in building economic resilience, Dr Chalmers added.
“Those are areas where we can actually make a difference,” he said.
What rubbish:
- On skill shortages, Labor is importing a new round of millions of unskilled migrants to crush load the economy and leave us, you guessed it, short of skills. There are at least some new incentives to train locals.
- On wages, Labor is now responsible for the single biggest shock in modern history, having failed to curtail the energy cartels that will deliver an added 5% to the CPI over two years.
- On supply chains, Labor is hollowing out the last of our industry at spectacular speed via energy costs.
- On inflation, see point 2.
- On resilience, see point 3.
It’s not like I’m making this up. Here are the charts. Real wages are tumbling the most in forty years:
According to my best guess (using annual data) this will make Chicken Chalmers responsible for the worst shock to living standards of any treasurer since 1983 by a country mile:
Note, especially, that if it were not for his failure to confront the energy cartels, Australians would be creaming it with fantastical low inflation in the global context.
This is what Chicken Chalmers should be doing instead of lying about his options: breaking the energy cartels that are delivering a 5% CPI shock over two years via utility bills.
I could on. As well as energy, the Chicken is also hiding under the doona on wildly inappropriate Stage 3 tax cuts, which rather look like UK-style voodoo economics at this juncture.
Completing that idiocy, we can’t let pass the irony that those tax cuts only got approved in a deal with Senator Rex Patrick who demanded price-triggered gas reservation in return. A written contract subsequently broken by Psycho Morrison.
Let’s not even bother going into the implications of crashing asset prices of this cowardice. Suffice it to say, the bill runs into the trillions of dollars.
The Albanese Government got into power on a platform of rising wages, falling living costs, and restoring economic resilience. Instead, it is delivering the opposite at ludicrous speed. Why? This:
A Labor source said Dr Chalmers was still “scarred” from the failed “super profits” mining tax in 2010 when he was a senior adviser to then treasurer Wayne Swan, and that he did not want to revisit the idea.
Chicken Chalmers is either so stupid that he knows none of this. Or, he knows all of it and is outright lying about it.
This breaks another Albo election commitment: restored policymaking integrity, which also appears to be underway in backroom deals with the Coalition to ensure a toothless new federal ICAC.
Meet the new boss, the same as the old boss.
