Treasurer Jim “Chicken” Chalmers has a message for you:
Jim Chalmers says the government’s reform agenda is about “modernising and maximising” the economy.
…“Many of you understand that we won’t make it more productive by just asking people to work longer for less,” he tells attendees at The Australian Financial Review Business Summit at Sydney’s Hilton Hotel.
“We’ll make our economy more productive by renovating our competition settings, by training and educating a more skilled and adaptable workforce, by harnessing data and digital technology more effectively, by delivering care more efficiently, and by investing in cheaper, cleaner energy.”
Australia is experiencing an oligopolistic inflation shock. There is no competition policy to fix it—literally nothing.
Instead, ever-increasing subsidies are being deployed to hide the lack of competition and shift inflation from the CPI to the tax system.
Take Jim’s “cheap and clean” energy. Australia now has higher power prices than most of our gas export customers, and states are rushing to extend coal power.
However, the shock is being shifted from the CPI to the tax system via Chalmer’s retail bill subsidies.
It is the same in rents and house prices and works so well that it will likely expand further. How long before we see food stamps for Coles and Woolies, for instance?
Likewise, almost nothing is being done to increase training. Instead, it is about filling “skilled shortages” via mass immigration.
This has transformed degrading tertiary education into giant visa-printing machines for foreign students with toilet paper degrees, rendering all studies worthless.
If by “digital technology”, Chicken Chalmers means AI, then yes, it will lift productivity.
However, it will come at the price of three million jobs even as mass immigration continues the permanent labour supply shock, crushing wages and pushing all income gains to capital.
Worry not; Chicken Chalmers will provide you with another subsidy, this time for doing nothing, in universal basic income.
It’s a thorough vision for a “modern” future of collapsing living standards disguised by an ever-increasing taxpayer reaming with one great risk.
China goes ex-growth, and its property black hole sends iron ore to $2o, where the tax system and the Chamlers’ “modern economy” fraud simultaneously collapse.
You go, girl.
