Chicken Chamlers is so spooked by his failed first year that he has taken to smoking crack.
A piece he wrote today in the AFR is as high as a kite:
Nearly 500,000 jobs have been created in just over a year, the fastest pace of growth under a new Australian government on record.
…Treasury estimates the NAIRU to be about 4.25 per cent but acknowledges there’s significant uncertainty around it, and it changes over time alongside the structure of our economy and the skills of the workforce.
While it’s a useful measure, it doesn’t capture the full potential of our workforce and it shouldn’t – and doesn’t – limit the government’s ambitions for getting more Australians into work.
There’s much that can be done to deal with structural issues that cause unemployment – from helping people acquire new skills or find affordable childcare, to making it easier to find housing in areas where jobs are available.
If we succeed in reducing these structural sources of unemployment, we can improve the level of full employment that our economy can sustain – pushing the NAIRU statistical measure lower and increasing the speed limit on our economy.
Riiight.
We’ve also had 400k new migrants, so we’ve created 100k net jobs, the slowest a new government has delivered for Australians as far back as anyone can remember.
Nor does the government have any visible productivity policies:
- Childcare is no more affordable now than it was before Labor pumped up prices with subsidies.
- Housing availability and affordability have crashed via the government’s out-of-control mass immigration. The HAFF is so small it is a joke.
- Skills and training have gone nowhere since the election. Again, one of the negative externalities of mass immigration is that it reduces private-sector training.
If Chicken Chamlers wanted full employment and a lower NAIRU, why is he inflating energy and housing costs at historical rates?
The truth is, Chicken Chalmers has delivered the biggest fall in living standards ever for the first year (or any year for that matter) of any treasurer in modern history (and probably forever):
It’s no wonder he sparked up the crack pipe.
