Treasurer Jim “Chicken” Chalmers wrote his PhD on Paul Keating and has now met his mentor’s most memorable achievement: endless recession.
As expected, yesterday’s National Accounts described the ongoing per-capita GDP reaming of Australians by their Treasurer.
Outside of pandemics, it is forty years since households have been so bashed up. Jim Chalmers has shrunk per-capita output by 1.1% over six quarters since he came to power:
Not even a Global Financial Crisis in (2008) or the greatest stock bubble and crash in one hundred years (2000) could compete.
Some of you will be concluding that I am being unfair. The pandemic hangover and the Ukraine War, you will say, are to blame. But they are not.
Treasurer Jim “Chicken” Chalmers is not like Paul Keating at all. He is Keating’s opposite: a political toady and policy jellyback who curries favour with greybeards rather than emulating their reform spine.
As a result, Treasurer Jim “Chicken” Chalmers made two catastrophic blunders to deliver most of the per capita GDP downdraft of the last 18 months.
First, he dropped an immigration bomb that has blown up wage growth, as well as driving housing inflation mad.
Second, he enabled a disastrous energy gouge by globetrotting gas corporations during the Ukraine War instead of using the crisis to resolve all East Coast energy problems.
These two titanic blunders comprised roughly half of last year’s inflation surge. They drove wage growth down and spiked interest rates, resulting in zero consumption growth.
To put it another way, Jim “Chicken” Chalmers crushed Australian households to make room for cheap foreign labour and Big Oil war profiteering.
Paul Keating would never have done either of these things. He slashed immigration during the nineties recession. And he added the petroleum resource rent tax.
Keating was also in the middle of a revolutionary reform programme that ushered in a decade of prosperity.
Chalmers is in the midst of crawling to vested interests in a manner that will perpetuate another lost decade for living standards.
For these reasons, Jim “Chicken” Chalmers surpasses Paul Keating in Australia’s ignominious recession Hall of Fame.
