Andrew Bolt: We’re all paying a big price for Labor’s idiocy

Australia has entrusted our economy to a PM, Treasurer and Energy Minister whose private sector experience between them amounted to eight weeks at a McDonald’s and an after-school stint at a bank. Now there’s wreckage everywhere you look.

The Albanese government’s big dreams are over, smashed by reality. Wednesday’s shockingly weak growth figures show Australians have paid too much for them already.

This is a crisis. For 21 months in a row now, we’ve got poorer per person.

Judging by disposable income, Australians are 8.7 per cent poorer than they were the day Anthony Albanese became prime minister.

Oh, the dreams that this Socialist Left warrior and his ideologues had back then! They’d do what few before had tried – not realising that was because their plans wouldn’t work.

Albanese was going to lift real wages by simply forcing bosses to pay more, either by law or by giving unions more muscle.

Chris Bowen’s global warming crusade has helped ramp electricity prices so high that 130,000 Australians are now on energy hardship repayment plans. Picture: Martin Ollman

Treasurer Jim Chalmers was going to reinvent capitalism – boasting he’d create a new “values-based capitalism” – which turned out to be blowing more billions on what he now called “investments”, especially on “cleaner and cheaper energy”.

Energy Minister Chris Bowen was farcically going to cut our electricity bills by $275 by getting rid of coal and powering our economy with wind and solar power instead.

And Immigration Minister Andrew Giles was going to throw open our doors to the biggest invasion of immigrants yet seen.

It stuns me that this insane agenda was ever taken seriously. It was like trusting a plumber to do open-heart surgery.

Actually, forget the analogy. We in fact entrusted our 21st century economy to a Prime Minister, Treasurer and Energy Minister whose private sector experience between them amounted to eight weeks at a McDonald’s and a short stint after school at a bank.

Well, now see the wreckage, every direction you look.

Albanese making businesses pay higher wages without workers working smarter means our productivity is now down the toilet.

It’s Chalmers who today looks beclowned. Picture: Nikki Short

Bowen’s global warming crusade has helped ramp electricity prices so high that 130,000 Australians are now on energy hardship repayment plans. NSW residents were last week even told not to use their washing machines and dishwashers on a warm day.

Giles’ mass immigration – more than 1.5m extra people, net – has crowded our cities and caused a terrible shortage of housing.

But it’s Chalmers who today looks beclowned.

Spending billions more, and not just on his green “investments”, has just added to the inflation that’s making us poorer, and set us up for what he admits will be 10 straight years from now of budget deficits.

Sure, the Australian Bureau of Statistics said on Wednesday that this massive spending spree is why the economy still grew – just – in the last quarter, and by just 0.8 per cent for the year.

But what a distortion that spending by Chalmers and the states has created.

Look where most of the extra jobs created in the past year have been: in healthcare, administration and support services, public administration, and education and training.

Get the picture? These are mainly jobs created by governments spending money that must be created somewhere else.

Giles’ mass immigration – more than 1.5m extra people, net – has crowded our cities and caused a terrible shortage of housing. Picture: Tamati Smith

Then look where there’s been the biggest job losses: manufacturing, construction, and professional, scientific and technical services. Those are sectors that actually make, build and invent the stuff that creates our wealth.

The biggest job losses of all are in hospitality, but that’s no surprise. Poorer people don’t go out as much.

Reality has hit. How could anyone have thought Albanese and his dreamers could power a modern economy on flickering electricity from wind towers and solar panels?

How could anyone have believed that making it harder for bosses would make businesses stronger? That socialist levels of spending would lower inflation and give us a go-ahead economy?

You’d need to be blinded by ideology to cause so much damage. Only ideology can explain having also an environment minister who kills a $1bn gold mine because some people identifying as Aboriginal told her Dreamtime stories that traditional owners said were actually false.

I know, the government has issued a bucket of bandages to try to stem the bleeding. Take the rebates – which you’ll pay for – which it’s handing out as compensation for huge rises in electricity prices. Or the cheaper childcare.

But it’s money taken from one pocket to put in another, while we’re on a sinking ship.

There will still be voters who won’t believe just how utterly this government has failed.

That will change with time as this per-capita recession gets worse and the blackouts come.

Do we have this time, though? How much poorer can we afford to get?

Originally published as Andrew Bolt: We’re all paying a big price for Labor’s idiocy