Here is the chart that defines the failure of the worst treasurer in modern Australian history:
Treasurer Jim Chalmers has destroyed fifteen years of Australian household purchasing power growth in just eighteen months.
Roughly half of this was unavoidable as global inflationary forces arrived Downunder. The rest is directly the responsibility of Jim “Chicken” Chalmers via three main factors:
- enabling a utility bill shock owing to fear of corporate blowback;
- suppressing wages with mass immigration owing to fear of corporate blowback, and
- enabling a rental shock owing to fear of corporate blowback.
By repeatedly giving in to big business, Chalmers has gutted workers in record time.
To be sure, it is strange work for a ‘Labor’ treasurer.
To cover this failure, Treasurer Chalmers might have pivoted to progressive policy. But, that is not in his DNA. Chalmers is the embodiment of two decades of Labor in the wilderness. The perfect cipher of Albo’s plan to never upset big business.
So, instead, Chalmers has turned to firehosing lies to hide his betrayal of workers:
The 560,000 jobs created on our watch are more than any other first-term government on record and we’re only half way through our first term….
Inflation has passed the quarterly peak recorded in the March quarter before the election, although it remains higher than we would like, and petrol prices are expected to put upward pressure on the new numbers we get on Wednesday.
We’ve delivered the first surplus in 15 years and overseen the biggest nominal budget turnaround in Australian history, from a $78bn projected deficit under the Coalition to a $22.1bn surplus under Labor.
We’ve delivered the kind of responsible economic management and spending restraint that would be unrecognisable to our predecessors – banking more than 87% of upward revisions to revenue across two budgets and finding more than $40bn in savings. We’ve done this while rolling out around $23bn of relief through our 10-point cost-of-living plan.
From the energy rebates the Liberals and Nationals voted against, to cheaper childcare, tripling Medicare bulk-billing incentives, cheaper medicines, a boost to income support payments, fee-free TAFE training, more affordable homes, expanded paid parental leave, higher wages and help to pay the rent – we’re helping Australians who need it most.
First lie. What good is 560k jobs when you’ve imported 500k new workers? 60k net jobs in 18 months is a disgrace for any government.
Second lie. Wages are not rising at their fastest pace in a decade. Real wages have been smashed. Everybody, including the obtuse ABC has already debunked this lie:
Third lie: what good is a surplus if it is not big enough? Chalmers needed to detract from inflation with less spending to aid the RBA.
Any sensible federal Treasurer would have considered state Labor governments’ runaway spending, which will add 2% to GDP over the next year as they chase Chalmers’ maniac population growth with breakneck infrastructure spending.
Many more lies. The energy rebates did not cover the bill shock and were only necessary because Chalmers failed to act when energy cartels imported Ukraine War inflation we never had to have.
Childcare expenses have skyrocketed as poorly designed Albanese subsidies were greedflated by providers, leaving families worse off.
Boosts to training locals have taken a very distant backseat to the import of record numbers of foreign workers, triggering an unprecedented rental (and homelessness) shock.
And let’s not forget that while Australians got poorer at historic speed, Treasurer Chamlers was preoccupied with a useless well-being index that will never be seen again, and a mistimed Voice debacle that has set Reconciliation back a generation.
In twenty years of analysing the Australian economy, I have never seen a treasurer lie so outrageously.
