Anthony Albanese shows he’s ‘unfit’ to be PM

For Anthony Albanese not to know the official cash rate and unemployment rate shows that everything that’s been happening in the economy has passed him by completely.

Labor leader Anthony Albanese. Picture: Toby Zerna

Oh dear. Day one of the election campaign and opposition leader Anthony Albanese announces he is unfit to be prime minister.

That’s to say, not ‘unfit’ in the so-often whining leftist wokist assertion based on some supposed misdeed and more often than not of just not thinking or speaking in the authorised leftist/wokist vocabulary.

But unfit in the old-fashioned – true – way; incapable of doing the job; plain and simply just not up to it. Prime Minister Scott Morrison didn’t know the ‘prices’ of milk and bread; Albanese didn’t know the Reserve Bank’s official cash interest rate and he didn’t know the unemployment rate.

Which do you think it is more important for your country’s PM to know? To do the best job – managing the country and over-sighting all, and I mean all, the important policy decisions?

Somebody that knows the ‘price’ of some basic commodities? What? So they can better empathise with people knowing that milk costs, say, $2.20 rather than $1.80?

Or somebody that knows the key figures in and about the economy and indeed the critical policies like interest rates that are operating and impacting big-time on all Australians?

So that person has a better chance of actually understanding what is going on the economy and what is needed?

Indeed, so they can better understand, assess, and interrogate advisers, to decide on the policy proposals?

Now, I put that word prices in quotation marks for both a simple and yet very important reason.

Anthony Albanese on Sky News on Monday where he did not to know the unemployment figures or current official cash rate. Picture - Sky News

As the smartarse reporter who put the ‘gotcha’ question to the PM in February seemingly didn’t understand, there is no ‘price’ for either bread or milk.

There are multiple prices for both and they now vary both geographically and qualitatively and those variations are huge. There isn’t even a single ‘price’ at which most loaves, most litres, are sold at.

We’ve long since moved beyond the 1950s world when there was only one type of bread and one type of milk and the prices for them were fixed either by government regulation or resale price maintenance.

Bread ranges in price from $3 to $10 a loaf and there are probably examples outside that range; milk from $1.10-a-litre to $3 or more.

In stark contrast there is only one cash rate: the 0.1 per cent it’s been since November 2020. There is only one official ABS national unemployment rate: the 4.0 per cent (for February) at the top of the ABS’s home page.

These are the two single most important economic numbers for the vast majority of Australians.

The cash rate is the underpinning for all interest rates across the economy; it’s the reason why the home loan rates for first home buyers are around 2 per cent.

The jobless rate – as I’ve been discussing since Covid kicked off, the real jobless rate, better gleaned from the Roy Morgan Research numbers, but that’s a different story, and one that doesn’t distract from Albanese’s stunning incompetence – is critical for just about everything in your lives.

Albeit, most obviously, whether you have a job; have a chance of getting a job; and what sort of pay you might get.

For Albanese not to know these numbers, or get even close – 5.4 per cent for the jobless rate against 4 per cent? – shows that everything that’s been happening in the economy has passed him by completely.

Seriously, he doesn’t know that the single biggest policy issue is when and by how much the RBA lifts the rate from 0.1 per cent; and how that will impact on millions of borrowers?

You can come back from not knowing the price of milk, you can not come back from this revelation of such damning and comprehensive unfitness.

Originally published as Anthony Albanese shows he’s ‘unfit’ to be PM