The iMSM is up to its usual rent-seeking in the wake of the appointment of deputy governor, Michele Bullock, to the RBA’s top job.
Access journalism means that the overwhelming majority of commentary is positive. A few voices make the kindergarten-level observation that the appointment is corrupt.
In an accountable public institution, how can the 2IC of a cultural, process and literal institutional failure be tasked with repairing her own damage?
On that basis, the most serious pejorative outcome of the appointment takes in Australia’s broader macroeconomic management.
Monetary policy is easy. It is independent, apolitical (except for a scapegoated Phil Lowe) and operates within technocratic guardrails.
Much harder is fiscal policy which is the opposite of all of the above: difficult, vested, political and pliable. And this is where the Bullock disappointment rubber hits the road.
It illustrates, once again, that Treasurer Jim “Chicken” Chalmers is a jelly-back policymaker prone to taking easy options, symbolic choices, political calculations and fake reforms.
Given the Australian economy faces an approaching armada of difficult decisions, this is the worst-case scenario for the national interest.
A cowardly treasurer who would rather produce an edifice of balderdash to cover his failures than upset anybody with real policy fixes.
In eighteen short months, this Chalmer’s weakness has resulted in a war-profiteering energy price shock, rental price shock, the sharpest interest rate shock ever, unemployment benefits unreform, failed Stage Three tax cuts unreform, housing unreform, the deepest falls in real income in modern history and a per capita recession.
In short, Chicken Chalmers has demolished worker living standards in record time and shows zero cognisance that it is his weakness that has caused it.
Ahead are the epochal challenges of:
- the decline of China;
- the challenge of re-industrialisation;
- the energy transformation;
- the death of productivity gains;
- falling national income, rising unemployment, falling wages growth, and sticky inflation;
- failed competitiveness and competition and innovation;
- over and aging population…
If Chicken Chalmers is in control for much longer during that then workers are fooked.
MB’s Leith van Onselen discussed Michele Bullock’s compromised appointment on Sky News on Friday night:
