The sage advice Margaret Thatcher would have offered to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese

Margaret Thatcher and Anthony Albanese are not names you normally hear together. Then again, our re-elected PM might do well to take some of her sage advice, writes James Morrow.

At a moment when the right side of politics is on the run in Australia it may seem a little odd to quote Margaret Thatcher, one of the greatest conservative leaders the English speaking world has ever known.

But just as Roman emperors had slaves to whisper in their ear, “remember, you are mortal,” so too could Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Treasurer Jim Chalmers use a little voice to remind them the rules of economics still apply, even to a Labor government that’s just won a thumping landslide.

So, here goes.

“The problem with socialism,” Thatcher once famously said, “is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.”

Albanese might reject the socialist label as a relic of his youth but Thatcher’s principle still remains.

Over the course of the campaign Labor made promises worth around $32 billion – almost $1 billion in commitments for every day from the day the prime minister went to see the governor-general until the pols closed.

These sweet nothings whispered into voters’ ears came as the nation contemplated $1 trillion in government debt and no real prospect of the government ever coming back into surplus.

In fairness, it must be noted that the Coalition was, if you can believe it, even more profligate during the campaign.

Over the course of the campaign Labor made promises worth around $32 billion. Picture: Getty

The Liberals’ abandonment of any pretence of fiscal discipline is in no small part why they lost, and why so many conservatives feel politically homeless in Australia.

But that’s another story. Labor is now in power, and may wind up getting two terms out of the majority it achieved Saturday night.

That’s six years when a lot can go wrong, and it will be a time when blaming trouble on “the mess the opposition left behind from their time in government” will look like a lame excuse when things go wrong.

And go wrong they surely will.

Not only is there that pesky trillion dollars worth of debt to deal with, but also the very real prospect that we could lose our AAA credit rating because of Labor’s spending habits – a potential disaster that would make servicing the interest on all that debt so much more expensive.

Margaret Thatcher had some sage advice that would apply to Anthony Albanese.

When the story broke in the last days of the campaign that Standard & Poor’s was casting a disapproving gaze in the direction of our national balance sheet, Albanese chose to laugh it off, saying there was “no danger” our AAA status was at risk.

Yet with Labor’s own March budget projecting debt servicing costs to hit $41.7 billion over the forward estimates, the prospect of a diminished credit rating should have served as a wakeup call.

Meanwhile inflation and interest rates are persistently too high, productivity is too low, and Labor seems addicted to immigration and sugar hits to keep the economy sticky-taped together.

None of this is, as the saying goes, sustainable, and it means the celebratory Iced Vovos and Viennettas of election night may be short lived indeed.

Which brings us back to another Thatcher line that perhaps both sides of politics would do well to remember.

As the Iron Lady once famously put it, “the facts of life are conservative.”

Originally published as The sage advice Margaret Thatcher would have offered to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese