Akerman: Wave to Uganda as Australia passes it on our slide down the world’s economic complexity ladder
Through the identity politics of the Labor-Green coalition, Australia is plummeting towards the bottom of the world barrel, writes Piers Akerman.
Opinion
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There is a crisis of trust of government in Australia at every level but especially in the Labor-Green informal federal coalition.
We don’t have an effective defence force. We don’t have a reliable energy supply, which undercuts any ability to create a strong economy; and there is a lack of transparency and integrity.
Supporters of global terrorism are permitted to block streets in Sydney and Melbourne with police assent.
Former left-wing Labor minister Kim Carr says in his upcoming memoir, A Long March, the Albanese government has lost touch with traditional blue-collar voters through its embrace of identity politics.
The Harvard Economic Complexity Index (ECI) shows we are plummeting towards the bottom of the world barrel. We’re 93 out of 133 countries, our lowest rating yet.
The ECI explores what nations produce and the complexity involved in the manufacturing process. The degree of difficulty, in Olympic jargon.
Under the Labor-Green energy policy, we can’t manufacture things requiring energy intensive production.
We ship our high-energy-producing coal to India and China where those nations manufacture steel to make goods to sell back to us.
Using our coal in another country makes the Labor-Green government feel virtuous as they reap the royalties from miners (against whom they campaign) and tax the exports while Green and teal activists block ports exporting our natural wealth.
No Monty Python script could match this – except the one adopted by every state which permits transgender people, and those generally confused about their gender, to alter their birth certificates to make a false statement at odds with the biological reality of the sex they were at birth.
This absurd denial of biological fact in favour of a legally sanctified fantasy is possibly the greatest recognition of the control identity politics now has over the nation.
It is wholly driven by activists representing a minuscule portion of the population.
But back to Harvard report. That now places Australia between Uganda and Pakistan. But while we shoot to the bottom, Uganda is forecast to make it into the top decile globally over the next 10 years, as it diversifies its production using its existing know-how.
We have the know-how, but we are sacrificing it to the braying of the Labor-Green-teal virtue-seekers.
If we only added a smidgen of value before exporting our raw materials we could expect premium prices for our products. But we don’t.
In our land-rich nation, we import more food than we export because of the strangling tangle of green and red tape imposed by bureaucrats and inner-urban dwellers who wouldn’t know a bull from a cow, just as they can’t tell a man from a woman.
While Harvard projects Ugandan economic growth of 7.5 per cent annually over the coming decade, the IMF predicts our run of inflation will exceed that of all advanced economies except Slovakia’s because of the failure to rein in government spending (which the Reserve Bank has repeatedly warned against).
Treasurer Jim Chalmers now claims our problems are the result of Israel’s war against terrorists and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
This is humbug. Since his party came to office, there has been massive overspending, with resultant borrowing, to pay for a huge increase in public service numbers.
Public servants do not create wealth (except for themselves). They require the rest of us to work harder so we can pay higher taxes to pay for the extra public service jobs.
Winston Churchill said in 1904: “I contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.”
It is as true today as it was 120 years ago, but our government is still in denial.
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