The big cost-of-living question is: How the hell are you going to fix this? | David Penberthy

The Treasurer’s spent a lot of time telling us bad things are going to get. What we really want to know, writes David Penberthy, is what you’re going to do.

It sometimes takes a while for a government to realise that it’s actually the government.

Watching Jim Chalmers deliver his first budget this week it was hard to tell if the guy is actually in charge of Treasury or instead an independent economist offering his thoughts on what by any measure are a chilling set of numbers.

Continuing high inflation, sustained interest rate increases and no pay rises for two years are coinciding with energy bill hikes of 20 per cent this year and 30 per cent next year.

As I am sometimes fond of saying, Chalmers needs to whip out his business card and remind himself what his job is. He is regarded as a smart bloke and touted as a future prime minister but in this, his first major foray in his new role running the nation’s finances, he came across not so much as inept but weirdly inactive in response to the genuine plight at hand.

The worst feature of that plight is, of course, the energy crisis and its potentially devastating role in worsening the cost-of-living crunch.

It is not hysterical to say that the forecast hikes will kill some businesses and leave some people at risk of freezing to death. Beyond just paying your burgeoning power bills is the problem of paying for everything else.

The increases Chalmers forecast don’t just amount to a total 56 per cent rise across the next two years, they will feed into the cost of absolutely everything we consume, and every service we rely upon.

And then comes the key question: what exactly is the government proposing to do about this? The answer on Tuesday seemed obvious.

Nothing.

What, me worry? Australian Treasurer Jim Chalmers speaks in parliaent on Wednesday. Picture: AAP / Lukas Coch

Watching Chalmers being interviewed by Channel 9’s Charles Croucher on Tuesday night was a depressing reminder of how politicians can speak at length without saying a damned thing.

On the energy questions, all of his answers sounded like platitudes that had been war-roomed before a hand-picked focus group of “average punters”. The sum mollifying effect was that things are going to get tough.

It all sounded sympathetic and sincere at the time, but reflecting on the interview afterwards, it begged a pretty obvious question about where to from here.

In fairness to the new government, part of its problem with energy is that this country has wasted 10 years with the deadlocked Coalition split between more moderate and scientifically informed MPs recognising the need to act on climate change, versus many National MPs and a few city-based sceptics saying the whole climate change thing is either a beat-up or a globalist conspiracy.

The end result of this impasse was inaction. But conversely, the Labor way on all this is to swing further in the other direction on renewables, even though it does not yet appear that they replicate the same level of power that we derive through fossil fuels.

To that end, the households and businesses of Australia risk being clobbered financially to pay for a grand moral gesture on behalf of mother Earth.

As I have said a few times now, I am not disputing that climate change is real and that we need to act on it. Renewables have to be the future. It is just not clear if they are the present.

But regardless, we have been madly unplugging as many coal-fired power stations as we can find, for what in a global sense is a modest environmental benefit, with an immediate hit to the reliability and affordability of our power supply.

But to return to the key point here – what is the government actually going to do? Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek said Thursday we need to “redouble” our efforts to get renewable energy into the grid.

Energy and Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen keeps talking about the “cheaper, cleaner” promise of renewables. The idea of talking about any form of energy being “cheaper” at the moment is a joke.

And as for the redoubling of effort envisaged by Plibersek, you would have to wonder what the timeline is on that, and what impact it will have on the 56 per cent hikes we are all going to be clobbered with by the end of next year.

The Coalition is on the mat after its poll drubbing earlier this year and Opposition Leader Peter Dutton is desperately unpopular. But as the country faces this growing cost-of-living crisis, you can see the seeds of a political crisis for Labor here if bills continue to soar in the absence of a clear plan to address the situation.

They already have the lead in their saddle bags of a particularly stupid broken promise, their absurd pledge to cut $275 off people’s power bills, which is now deader than disco. During the past few days this has become the pledge that dare not speak its name as Chalmers engaged in an orgy of headshaking at how tough things are about to get.

As has so often been the case across the past 40-odd years, veteran political analyst Paul Kelly put it most elegantly and succinctly in The Australian this week with the following lines.

“The budget is conspicuous for defining the problem yet unsure in signalling the solution. Chalmers knows the task – he grasps the challenge, but bringing the government to answers is a herculean job.”

In front-bar speak you would put those sentiments this way. We know things are stuffed, we keep getting these power bills. But you’re the government. What are you going to do about it?