When it comes to lies, the Albanese government is putting the Morrison government to shame.
PM Morrison was a serial liar. But many (not all) of his lies were behavioural:
- I did not go to that church.
- I did not say that.
- That is not my job.
- There is no sexual assault in parliament.
- I don’t hold the hose, mate.
Etcetera.
Conversely, the Albanese government is a policy liar. This is harder to detect but operates at a scale of mendacity far surpassing behavioural untruths.
The falsehoods are macroeconomic, so the damage is equally enormous. It also means that Treasurer Jim “Chicken” Chalmers has become Albo’s Prince of Lies.
Take last week, for example.
In seven days, Treasurer Chamlers lied so outrageously, so often that it was difficult for MB to keep up. Let alone an iMSM that no longer has the experience to notice.
The first lie was about wage growth.
Here is the truth of Chalmer’s “much stronger wage growth than our predecessors”:
The second lie was about superannuation.
According to the IGR’s projections, Australia is on track for pension payments to shrink from 2.3% of GDP to 2% by 2062-63 as superannuation balances grow from 116% of GDP today to 218%.
In 2062-63, approximately 9 million Australians will be aged 65 or older, although a smaller proportion will receive the aged pension or other income support, a 15% decrease from 2022-23.
Treasurer Jim Chalmers jumped on the findings to claim Labor’s genius compulsory superannuation system is saving the federal budget:
“Our population is ageing but our spending on the age pension will fall – that’s the intergenerational genius of super”.
“Super is delivering on its promise – providing a better retirement for more Australians and a better outcome for the budget over the next 40 years”.
“Labor built the super system and we’ve always worked to protect it and make it stronger.”
Except he didn’t mention that the super system runs on tax concessions for the rich that will surpass the pension and dramatically increase inequality:
The third lie was so scandalous that even the fake left press picked it up.
Climate change will cost us up to $423 billion in the next four decades, the sixth intergenerational report has found via the SMH ($), but Treasurer Jim Chalmers has declared Australia is now a “global leader in how we’re responding to the threat of global warming”. Australia is not a global leader in responding to the threat of global warming. We are not on track to reduce our emissions by 43% by 2030 — indeed, they’ve risen since 2021, as The Australia Institute shows — even though the government is working on a 2035 target now. Reuters reminds us we remain the world’s second-biggest coal exporter, the Albanese government continues to approve coalmines or expansions against UN advice (at least three so far), and our offsetting scheme has been dubbed “the world’s first government-mandated greenwashing system”. But we could be a leader — Australia is one of the windiest and sunniest places on earth, and home to half the world’s lithium, a renewable tech mineral. The report found global demand for it — as well as other critical minerals such as cobalt, manganese and rare earths — will surge by 350% by 2040.
Australia is 199th out of 209 countries in per capita emissions. Nothing the Albanese government has done is going to change this. Indeed, it will probably make it worse. Nuff’ said.
The fourth lie was about immigration.
Treasurer Chalmers said “the migration numbers are recovering. That’s not a government target or policy. That’s the demand-driven part of the program. It largely reflects the fact that international students are coming back quicker and people on tourist visas as well. That’s why we’re seeing these slightly higher numbers”.
“…even as our population grows in the future, in the Intergenerational Report, it’s actually going to grow slower over the next 40 years than it has been growing to this point. Population growth is slowing”.
The Albanese Government has deliberately engineered the immigration boom via policy actions, including:
- Agreeing to do it for big business at the Job and Skills summit.
- Extending post-study graduate visas by two years, thereby making student visas more attractive.
- Committing $42 million and 600 staff to clear the faux “one million visa backlog” and rubber stamping as many visa applications as possible.
- Approving 66,000 “pandemic event visas” rather than closing them down.
- Prioritising offshore visa applications over onshore.
- Signing open borders migration agreements with India that grant automatic five-year student visas, eight-year post-study work visas, and equalise all qualifications.
- Abolishing the Genuine Student Test on visa applications, giving international students an easier path to permanent residency.
All of the aforementioned policies have accelerated migrant arrivals into Australia, culminating in Australia’s largest net overseas migration (NOM) on record, crushed wage growth and the worst rental crisis in living memory:
In sum, Jim Chalmers bald-faced lied about most of the Albanese government’s economic agenda in seven inglorious days:
- It has no plan to make Australia a climate change leader.
- It has a very effective plan to smash wages and crush load infrastructure via deliberately engineered, record mass immigration.
- It is deliberately lying about improving the budget to protect the rich.
Suppose we add Treasurer Chalmers’s recent well-being report, which claimed that housing costs had fallen and incomes had risen.
In that case, we get a pattern of lying about Australia’s declining living standards so complete that we must accept one of two possible explanations:
- Jim Chalmers and the Albanese government have no idea what they are doing, or
- Jim Chalmers and the Albanese government know exactly what they are doing and are lying about it because if they tell Australians the truth, they will be tarred and feathered.
All of Labor can’t be that stupid. Which means that the lies are flowing because Albo’s internal polling has detected that Aussies are onto him:
