Jim Chalmers is playing a dangerous game based on economic fantasies and radical ideology

‘Treasurer Jim’ Cairns was hardly a resounding success yet seems to be the role model for the current Treasurer Jim Chalmers, writes Piers Akerman.

The last Labor treasurer named Jim was hardly a resounding success yet he seems to be the role model for the current Treasurer Jim Chalmers.

The earlier “Treasurer Jim” was Jim Cairns, probably best remembered now for his affair with Labor staffer Junie Morosi, whom he had hired, and for his embrace of socialist economics with a touchy-feely overlay that many attributed to Morosi’s influence.

Cairns, a former police officer, had once applied to join the Communist Party but humiliatingly had his application rejected because party officials suspected he may have been a plant.

Morosi successfully sued a Sydney radio station and The Daily Mirror for defamation, claiming the media outlets had suggested their relationship was improperly romantic or sexual, which both Cairns and Morosi denied.

Cairns later admitted that he had had a sexual relationship with his staffer but that was nothing compared to the alternate philosophies to which she introduced him.

Then treasurer Dr Jim Cairns with his secretary Junie Morosi at Canberra Airport in December 1974.

Personal peccadillos aside, Cairns did hold a degree in economic history, not economics, and was in fact the first Victorian policeman to hold a tertiary degree.

That did not stop him in 1974 when deputy prime minister from espousing a bizarre economic philosophy which included a world in which money was abolished.

Then deputy prime minister Dr Jim Cairns with Junie Morosi at Bredbo, south of Canberra, where an Alternative Lifestyle Festival was being held in 1977.

An account of his address to students at the ANU written by former Age economics writer Tony Thomas, who was present at the event, tells of Cairns arriving at the university accompanied by staffer Morosi dressed in “swami-style” robes. According to Thomas, Cairns sermonised that money transactions “epitomised the soulless relations between people. Money put barriers between us, money made us selfish”.

“In fact,” Thomas wrote for Quadrant magazine, Cairns said: “It would be a better world if money was abolished. We would give and take, based on a better style of relationship between individuals. Strife would subside. Harmony would reign. The world would become a better place.”

The new Treasurer Jim doesn’t have an economics degree, nor does he bring to his position any of the real-world experience the former policeman was able to draw upon, but his recent 6000-word essay on his wishful thinking on economic reform is just as off the planet as Cairns’ socialist fantasy.

Chalmers was awarded a PhD from the ANU in political science for his thesis on Paul Keating’s prime ministership and is one of those academics who style themselves as “Dr”, even though a political science degree is not one many academics would shout about, nor for that matter are his other degrees in Arts and Communications.

Federal Treasurer Jim Chalmers. Picture NCA NewsWire/Aaron Francis

Chalmers real-life experience amounts to no more than a series of jobs within the Labor Party.

He worked first as a research officer for former Queensland premier Peter Beattie, then as a national research officer, before becoming media adviser to then Treasurer Wayne Swan, who boasted his economic skills without delivering even one of his four promised surpluses.

Work in then-opposition leader Kim Beazley’s office followed, then in the office of then-NSW premier Morris Iemma, back to Swan’s office, followed by a stint at the Chifley Research Centre – a Labor think-tank.

But his appointment as Treasurer has triggered such a rush of blood to the head that he now feels competent to deliver a manifesto on economics that makes the old Communist Five Year plans look like models of economic rationalism.

With as much meaning as the specious term “wellness”, Chalmers’ plan envisages the government interfering in the mechanisms which have delivered stability and opportunity to most of the civilised world.

Nothing would be safe from his interference – your home, your savings, your super, your relationship with your employer, – and neither he nor Prime Minister Anthony Albanese warned us that this was part of Labor’s plan before last year’s election.

The Chalmers’ declaration would effectively reverse the lauded reforms of the Hawke-Keating years and bring back an old-fashioned Whitlamesque command economy.

His vision has as much real-world substance as fairy floss but, if implemented in the least degree, it would nuke what remained of the national economy after the global warming fanatics destroy the mining and primary industry sectors.

Not yet a year into the job, this neophyte has yet to learn the limits of his knowledge. He simply doesn’t know what he doesn’t know, and channelling former New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern or the juvenile Greta Thunberg’s whining is not the answer.

Chalmers’ adolescent and utopian fantasy should be disavowed by the ALP immediately before the global market realises its Treasurer is still on his training wheels and abandons our nation.