Dr Jim “Chicken” Chamlers is about as labour as my butt:
Jim Chalmers has attacked Peter Dutton as the “most divisive leader of a major party in Australia’s modern history” who is deliberately undermining cohesion and preying on social fractures for political advantage, positioning himself ahead of the election as a Treasurer who can take on the alternative prime minister.
Dr Chalmers, considered a future Labor leader and potential successor to Anthony Albanese, used a major pre-election speech on Monday night to warn economic dislocation is triggering waves of global violence fanned by fragmentation and destructive leadership.
The 46-year-old also said Labor’s stage-three tax cuts overhaul was his “proudest” moment and outlined his blueprint for a “fourth economy” led by artificial intelligence, a bigger care economy, 90 per cent of electricity globally generated by renewables by 2050 and a bigger, more influential Indo-Pacific region.
For anyone with a memory longer than a Millennial, this analysis is dangerous claptrap.
Culture wars are not the stuff of division. Class wars are.
Historians accept that even the most horrific instances of social division, such as those in Nazi Germany, were the result of demagogues leveraging anger and economic disadvantage.
It is the failure to spread the benefits of capitalism that threatens the foundations of freedom for the fringes and the center of society alike.
That is why a centre-right site like MB focuses on it with such intensity.
What can we say, then, of the treasurer who was so fearful of a handful of corporations that he enabled war profiteering in energy and an immigration supply shock to unleash the worst real income shock in modern history inside two years?
We can say that he is the most dangerously divisive leader the nation has seen in a long, long while.
