Credlin: How Jim Chalmers is putting his ambitions ahead of Australian families

Treasurer Jim Chalmers, using clever spin to mask his failures, is all about his political reputation at the cost of your family’s financial survival, writes Peta Credlin.

Last week the national accounts were released and every Australian needs to understand what these numbers mean for our families and our country’s future.

I worry that not everyone has grasped what is happening economically, and why.

As the figures make clear, individually, we are all getting poorer, even if the country itself is still growing, although very slightly, at just 0.2 of a per cent. And what that means is that we are in the midst of a per capita recession; a recession per head of population and we’re deep into it, because it’s six quarters now of going backwards on per person basis.

Individually, we’re all 1.5 per cent poorer today than we were 18 months ago and that’s the biggest sustained drop in our living standards since Paul Keating’s “recession that we had to have” 30 years back.

While the headline growth figure is still in positive territory – just, at 0.2 per cent – that’s only because the Albanese government is flooding the economy with taxpayers’ money; and because it’s also importing migrants at all-time record levels. If one or either of those things weren’t happening – the unsustainable spending or the high migration – we would have no growth at all and we’d be in official recession, not just per capita recession.

Federal Treasurer Jim Chalmers. Picture: NewsWire/Martin Ollman

But what the Treasurer won’t admit is that it’s the high migration and the debt-laden spending that’s actually making our lives harder, not easier. More migrants mean downward pressure on wages, upward pressure on housing costs, and massive pressure on infrastructure. And more government spending means higher taxes, and it also means higher inflation, with the sorry result that your mortgage won’t be any easier to pay any time soon.

So, if that’s what’s happening, why is Labor doing it?

Treasurer Jim Chalmers would prefer that your life is harder, to protect his goal of becoming PM one day.

They’re doing it because they know to fall into official recession would be the end of this government and Chalmers personally knows it would kill off his ambitions to be prime minister. And, while the spending and the high migration keeps us out of official recession – just – it is the reason why inflation is still too high, and the Reserve Bank still can’t take the threat of rate hikes off the table, let alone bring about any cuts to the official cash rate.

In a nutshell, Treasurer Jim Chalmers would prefer that your life is harder, to protect his goal of becoming PM one day. It is all about his political reputation at the cost of your family’s financial survival.

The basic problem is that Chalmers is ambitious, so he won’t stand up to the Greens or the unions lest this hurt his chances of taking the top job sometime in the future. And now that Bill Shorten is going, his position on the Labor right has strengthened, so he’s pushing his leadership credentials as the shine well and truly comes off Albanese.

So the end result is that if Chalmers can’t make the economy grow by making all of us more productive, and doing the hard policy work, as Keating did and Costello did, he will make the economy grow by importing more people. It’s lazy, it’s risky and it’s making inflation worse, and inflation is the biggest fear of central banks across the world and we’re way behind other countries in getting it under control.

Then treasurer Paul Keating in 1990.

Then treasurer Peter Costello in 2002.

To fuel his spending, Chalmers is borrowing big from overseas with our official debt position running at $930.8bn. Remember, it was zero, with cash in the bank, when John Howard left office. Ahead of us, we have billions to be borrowed and spent to chase a net zero emissions policy that simply defies engineering reality, with many of those borrowed billions ending up as subsidies to foreign renewables companies.

Albanese might be weak but Chalmers is little better, using clever spin to mask his failures. And because a lot of this economic talk is complex, he’s banking on the fact that most people won’t understand how he’s hanging them out to dry for the sake of his personal ambition.

Labor’s economic strategy is built on a house of cards designed to get these economic vandals through the election to another term in office.

Will we fall for it?

ALBANESE’S MULTI-FLAG MANIA DEGRADES AUSTRALIA’S NATIONAL IDENTITY

Last Tuesday, the Albanese government marked National Flag Day with social media posts that placed the Australian flag right alongside the Aboriginal flag and the Torres Strait Islander flag, as if our country had three flags rather than just one.

To put the record straight, under the Flag Act 1953, there is only one “national” flag, the blue ensign that was once the only flag flown on government buildings, or behind our leaders in their press conferences. The other two Indigenous flags are not national flags. They are “official” flags, of which we have dozens, many of them military.

But despite the special legal status of our national flag, the Prime Minister doesn’t honour it.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese speaking before the Australian, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags. Picture: NewsWire/David Beach

It is now routine under the Albanese government, wherever there’s more than one flagpole, to fly the national flag alongside one or more Indigenous flags. And while the national flag has the formal place of honour on the left from the main vantage point, to all the world we look like a country that’s so confused about our national identity that we need more than one flag.

It’s easy to see what’s really going on here. Flying the Aboriginal flag, equally with the Australian flag, is a not-very-subtle way of saying that this is really Aboriginal land. It’s meant to reinforce the activists’ line, “always was, always will be”. Some people might think it’s just a polite gesture but it’s actually deeply subversive of our national unity.

The left are very good at changing our country by stealth. When have voters ever been asked whether we thought the flag of some of us should nearly always fly co-equally with the flag of all of us? Was this ever debated in parliament? Did the Prime Minister tell us, before the election, he would never do a press conference before our national flag, without the Aboriginal flag there too?

These sneak attacks on our institutions and our symbols must end.

At least the one thing that’s almost never seen is Peter Dutton with any flag behind him other than the Australian one. Let’s hope that continues should he become PM.

THUMBS UP

Retiring former Labor leader Bill Shorten – one of the last champions of Bob Hawke-style economic rationality inside Labor, and someone who in my personal dealings with him could always be trusted to put Australia first on national security.

THUMBS DOWN

Turncoat Liberal Matt Kean – his latest Climate Commission report demands changes from Australians that the rest of the world simply aren’t matching. We are committing economic suicide when we are about 1% of the emissions problem.

Watch Peta on Credlin on Sky News, weeknights at 6pm