Andrew Bolt: Big spending Jim Chalmers blaming everyone but himself for budget woes

With the country’s finances in much, much worse shape than predicted, you’re probably wondering how Jim Chalmers could spend so much money and still leave Australians worse off.

Jim Chalmers started his budget speech by paying his respects to “the Ngunnawal people here, and the Yagara and Yugambeh back home”.

But the rest of us he then treated like fools.

Oh, the spin about how he’d supposedly “banked” a lot of savings from the torrent of cash Lucky Jim got from an unexpected boom in prices for our gas, coal and iron ore, alas temporary.

Oh, the joy with which he talked about the tax cuts you were going to get which will amount to … oops … just $5 a week next year and another $5 the year after.

Never mind!

You’d probably have just wasted the money if he’d returned you more of your money. Better give it to Chalmers to spend instead! Lord knows, he needs it.

Then came Lucky Jim’s boast in his speech that the “worst is behind us” with the country’s finances in “better shape” than three years ago.

Does anyone believe this junk?

Here’s the bottom line. Ignore the spin: the finances are in fact in much, much worse shape than Chalmers predicted in his budget just last year, because Lucky Jim spent too much, the windfalls shrunk and he’s now Unlucky Jim, blaming everyone but himself.

Yet a year ago, in his previous budget, Chalmers acknowledged the money was already running out, predicting the following four budgets would rack up deficits totalling $112bn.

A prudent Treasurer would have cut spending, but this is a desperate government facing an election it could lose.

So it’s instead promised $67bn of vote-for-Labor promises in just the past three months.

No surprise, then, that a year on from last year’s budget, and it turns out those accumulated deficits of $112bn Chalmers predicted now add up to $144bn.

Add the deficit in the year after that and Chalmers is promising to spend $180bn more by 2029 than he will earn.

Where on earth has all that money gone?

I mean, apart from the government splashing it on hiring 36,000 more public servants, on subsidies for its pointless green schemes and now for compensation to voters – of their own cash, mind you – for Labor’s failures.

Mark Knight's take on the federal budget.

Look at all the money this government is now promising to make voters feel less that inflation is tipped in the budget to go back up to 3 per cent next year.

There’s a $150 handout to hide the fact that your electricity bills have gone through the roof, thanks in part to Labor’s global warming schemes.

There’s rent assistance for poor renters and more help for first-home buyers, to hide the fact this government caused a housing crisis by letting in more than a million immigrants.

Shovel it out! More free doctor’s visits. Cheaper medicines. Free childcare now for even middle-class parents who just want to put their feet up.

Don’t actually need to prove they need the childcare to go to work, like the poor schmucks paying for it all.

This government is also wiping out student debts, which actually means that students who dutifully paid back their loans must also now help pay back the loans of those who didn’t.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers delivers the 2025 budget. Picture: Martin Ollman

If you nevertheless still (rightly) think it’s astonishing that Labor could plunge us so much deeper into a debt when we’ve got full employment, mass immigration, no recession and still healthy prices for our exports, I have even worse news for you.

Chalmers has actually shifted a lot of his spending off the budget with the most ludicrous con.

What you and I would call “spending”, Chalmers calls “investments” which he claims will actually make money – which means in his mind he doesn’t have to include them in those deficit figures that are always so embarrassing to big-spending socialist Left Labor governments.

“Investments”? Seriously?

There’s the National Broadband Network that’s actually just needed yet another government handout.

There’s also the Snowy 2.0 pumped-hydro white elephant, yet another global warming scheme that’s over budget and behind time.

Then there’s the government’s Made In Australia boondoggle, trying to pick green energy winners like, er, green hydrogen, which has turned out to be such a spectacular dud that Chalmers could barely bring himself to mention the miracle gas that Energy Minister Chris Bowen used to claim was essential to us becoming a “green energy superpower”.

These and other such “investments” are so dodgy that the budget admits they’ll actually cost us another $103bn by 2029.

Add that to the deficits Chalmers actually owned up to and – Houston, we have a problem. Gross debt next year will hit $1 trillion.

You must wonder how this government could spend so much and still leave Australians worse off, with nothing to spare in the cupboard come more bad times – which Chalmers openly admitted was on the cards: “The global economy is taking a turn for the worse.”

All you really need to know about our future under this government – so symbolic – is that the two fastest-rising spending items in this budget are interest on government debt, expected to grow 9.5 per cent a year, and the National Disability Insurance Scheme.

That’s so out of control that it will still grow a predicted 8 per cent a year, even though it already has an unbelievable 700,000 Australians on its teat, all claiming a “significant and permanent disability”.

No one can possibly believe that one in 35 Australians is that disabled. Yet on this government goes, shovel, shovel, shovelling out your money in handouts, instead of creating the wealth we desperately need to pay for this fool’s paradise.

Originally published as Andrew Bolt: Big spending Jim Chalmers blaming everyone but himself for budget woes