Australians should prepare for a week of financial fantasy

The week has kicked off with the greedy big business fantasies of the BCA and will end with the hopeless statistical fantasies of Treasury.

Retiring Business Council of Australia CEO Jennifer Westacott. Picture: NCA Newswire/ Adam Yip

We started the week with the ‘Big Biz’ fantasy reform plan to build a ‘Bigger, Better Australia’ and we are going to end it with the statistical fantasies of Treasury purporting to tell us what the 2063 Australia – certainly bigger but just as certainly not better - will look like.

Although, we actually also started the week with those Treasury fantasies, as their ‘punchline’ was leaked/released across the media over the weekend; and, heck, treasurer Jim Chalmers actually held a press conference Monday to talk about what he was going to ‘release’ on Thursday.

Indeed, it was almost as if he was intent on either stealing the Business Council’s thunder – what might be termed retiring BCA head Jennifer Westacott’s ‘Bequest to the Nation’ – or pre-interring some of the BCA’s unpleasant and presumably unwelcome suggestions.

Sorry Jennifer - and Chalmers being quite irrelevant - it just ain’t going to happen. Your report is going to join the hundreds that pre-date and pre-decease it in the dustbin of history; these days of course not on dusty shelves but in ‘the cloud’.

And, thank goodness for that, because so much of the report was a catalogue of what Big Biz was greedily grasping for.

The bit that really sent a very nervous shiver down my spine was the call for “strategic co-investment” between Government and business.

Oh right, governments – as in the unholy mix of politicians and bureaucrats - ‘picking winners’ has a proud record of success in Australia. Or indeed anywhere.

Other than in redirecting billions of dollars of taxpayer dollars into the pockets of private citizens.

Retiring Business Council of Australia CEO Professor Jennifer Westacott. Picture: NCA Newswire/ Adam Yip

Yes, of course, much of what was in the BCA report was absolute – if you’ll pardon the term - ‘motherhood’ statements about building a more productive, more prosperous future Australia.

But it all foundered – and indeed was founded – on two monumental falsehoods.

That not only did we have to ‘de-carbonise’ the economy, but that de-carbonisation would actually help build a more prosperous Australia.

And that a massive migration program was similarly both a necessity and a positive.

All that is not just false, but the very opposite of what would build a better future Australia.

The world is not decarbonising.

Despite the tens of trillions already spent on so-called – utterly unworkable – renewables, more than 80 per cent of our global energy is, as I discussed earlier in the month, still hydrocarbon-based: coal, gas and oil.

Of the rest as much is coming from nuclear as from wind and solar – the latter adding to barely 5 per cent of the total.

The only question is whether the inevitable implosion of so-called renewables happens totally chaotically or ‘merely’ catastrophically.

Yes, our abysmal productivity is, as the BCA notes, the absolute source of all our problems.

But wedded as it is – with greedy eyes on those government-mandated trillions – to the (utterly destructive) de-carbonisation fantasy, it is collectively incapable of understanding that cheap, plentiful and reliable hydrocarbon energy is the absolute basis for solving it.

It is similarly, institutionally incapable of understanding that a migration-driven bigger Australia is the soft option to avoid, and is the very antithesis of, a more productive, innovative, Australia.

Originally published as Australians should prepare for a week of financial fantasy