CFMEU crisis latest in long line of Labor failings

The CFMEU crisis is the latest in a long line of Labor failings that has left ordinary Australians short-changed.

Former CFMEU Victoria boss John Setka. Picture: Aaron Francis / Herald Sun

It’s still the economy, stupid. When I look at Canberra, individually and collectively, the very stupid.

The sharemarket might be at record levels; property prices continue to defy gravity - making the two-thirds of adult Australians who own property at least feel rich; superannuation balances have just jumped 8-10 per cent over 2023-24.

Yet the vast majority of Australians feel anything but financially well off.

Their all too-real day-to-day reality is high interest rates soaking up much of their disposable incomes - if they have a home loan.

Or punishing rents if they don’t. If they can indeed find a property to rent, that is.

Then, move on to the weekly supermarket bill; electricity and gas, education, health care, etc etc and many more etcs.

Those tax cuts? The $300 electricity handout to come?

Yeah, right; sitting somewhere between a drop in the ocean of financial pain, and an almost deliberate insult to their intelligence.

We’ll screw you blind; and then expect adulation when we ‘give’ you some of it back.

Then spare a particular thought for the 2.5 million or so SMEs - small and medium sized businesses - in Australia, and the maybe 5-7 million actual people behind them.

They suffer all the pain that every Australian has been subjected to, as individual Australians.

Plus the (quite unnecessarily) exploding costs of trying to run a business - plus the ever-expanding red tape.

In that broader reality of Australians as consumers suffering financial pain and not having the discretionary money to spend on their goods and services.

The critical, absolutely core, point is that it is all entirely self-imposed.

It doesn’t have to be this way. It is the direct and deliberate decisions of politicians - mostly but not exclusively in Canberra.

With the latest most obvious iteration, the out-of-control CFMEU - aided and abetted by the abolition of the construction industry watchdog by Prime Minister Albanese and the IR minister Tony Bourke.

Now, we can focus on this, and a host of other specific factors driving up costs and seriously hurting both jobs and business prospects and disposable incomes.

Including by forcing the Reserve Bank to keep interest rates higher than might otherwise be necessary.

But in big picture terms it all comes down to two things: two monumental stupidities.

The first is the completely out-of-control level of migration: a million migrants net in just two years, mostly flooding into Melbourne and Sydney.

Yes, they might keep the economy ticking over at the margin - providing workers in hospitality, and pumping their spending into the economy.

But those benefits are far, far outweighed by the costs - which spread right across the economy. Even to those sectors which receive no benefit on the other side.

The second is the deliberate program to destroy our electricity system.

We should be living in an Australia where electricity is plentiful, is reliable, and is cheap. As it used to be.

It’s not just the pain you feel in your bill, but the way high-cost power feeds so destructively into everything.

Australia was the lucky country. It’s now the - very - stupid country.