Opinion: Labor leaders more senile than Grampa Simpson

Treasurer Jim Chalmers’ transition to an old man should be seamless based on his recent behaviour, writes Matt Canavan.

Jim Chalmers blames Cyclone Alfred for the budget.

There is an episode of The Simpsons in which Grampa Simpson proudly displays a picture of himself in the local paper shaking his fist under the headline, “Old man yells at cloud”.

Our Treasurer, Jim Chalmers, is not yet an old man, but the transition into old age should be seamless based on his recent behaviour.

Next week Jim has to deliver an unexpected budget following the Cyclone Alfred induced delay to the federal election. In the lead-up, Jim is literally yelling at clouds blaming a cyclone for damaging the finances of his budget.

Cyclone Alfred did some terrible local damage but fortunately it was nothing on the scale of the 2011 floods or even the 2022 floods. Even before Alfred, Jim’s budget showed deficits totalling $140 billion over the next four years. The reported $1.2 billion cost of Alfred (and that’s to the overall economy not the budget bottom line) pales into insignificance.

No doubt this eye-watering amount of debt will grow after the enormous election giveaways that the Prime Minister has been busy handing out in recent weeks. Not even a storm as large as Alfred can cover Labor’s addiction to high spending and the massive decline in our nation’s fiscal health this has caused.

In some cases, Labor leaders are even more senile than Grampa Simpson because not only do they blame clouds for their woes, they think they can do something about them.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Treasurer Jim Chalmers during Cyclone Alfred. Picture: Tertius Pickard/NCA NewsWire

During Alfred, the Prime Minister claimed that climate change is causing more cyclones even though the number of cyclones (including severe cyclones) hitting Australia has been falling for 60 years.

Putting that aside the idea that Australia – accounting for just 1 per cent of global carbon emissions – could do anything to change the weather is not just senile it is certifiably insane. The rest of the world is not taking action to reduce their carbon emissions which continue to grow in Asia faster than spending in a Labor budget. In the UK, the Conservative Party (who were first to sign up to net zero) this week admitted that reaching net zero by 2050 was “impossible”. And President Donald Trump announced that the US would build new coal- fired power stations with their “beautiful, clean coal”.

And on the subject of Trump, old man Jim is shaking his fist at him too. You see, according to Jim, Australia’s dim economic prospects are all because Donald Trump has decided to put a tariff on our aluminium and steel exports.

This is so even though our aluminium and steel exports are just 0.2 per cent of our total exports, and that’s just 3 per cent of all our exports to the US. Also, Australia’s standard of living had dropped by 8 per cent, the biggest drop in the developed world since Covid, before Donald Trump was elected.

In next week’s budget Donald Trump will become Labor’s ultimate “dog ate my homework” excuse.

This is worse than yelling at a cloud because by blaming others for our problems we give up the chance to fix them ourselves.

The Left is obsessed with US President Donald Trump.

We have all the energy resources to have the cheapest energy in the world if we just were to use them. We should follow the UK Conservatives’ lead and drop the impossible net zero by 2050 target so that we remove a futile handbrake on our economy.

That would let us build new coal- fired power stations, rather than just spending billions extending old ones like the NSW and Victorian Labor Governments are doing.

We could open up Australia’s first shale gas resources in the Beetaloo basin in the Northern Territory offering the hope that we could have the kind of cheap gas that has supercharged America’s manufacturing sector. American gas prices are a third of Australia’s.

Cheap energy could unlock the massive parts of our country that remain undeveloped, many of which could create new food, transport and energy basins.

The most frustrating thing in politics right now is that every discussion eventually reverts to Donald Trump. The Left, in particular, are obsessed with him. No matter how much Trump works you up there is nothing we can do about him, and it is not healthy to obsess about things that you cannot change.

Given how many Australians are struggling, maybe we should stop worrying about America so much and instead focus on Australia. We don’t have to yell at the approaching clouds. We can batten down, survive the gathering storm and create a sunny new future for young Australians all by ourselves.

Matt Canavan is an LNP senator for Queensland

Originally published as Opinion: Labor leaders more senile than Grampa Simpson