Dr Jim’s ‘lucky country’ boost

Treasurer Jim Chalmers reacts during Question Time at Parliament House on Thursday. Picture: Martin Ollman

The great, overarching and completely unrecognised takeaway from the budget is what an

extraordinarily lucky country Australia is: arguably, the luckiest in the world.

And literally lucky, that is. Most decidedly not in the heavily ironic tone of Donald Horne’s “The Lucky Country” original.

Although, just as Horne meant the reference as an emphatic wake-up call, so the same should be the case today.

The luck is there to be grasped; and to date we have so grasped it – hence the way it was able to play out in the budget.

But the future?

Well, we are seemingly deliberately determined to now destroy our luck, directly attacking its very foundation, while embracing the immigration-fed Population Ponzi.

The entire budget, the overall numbers; Dr Jim’s precious, marginal and temporary surplus – the first since 2007-08, and not to be repeated on his and Treasury’s predictions, until at the very earliest 2034-35; all the handouts – was built on one thing.

That is our golden, globally unique, minerals and energy inheritance.

The only reason Dr Jim’s budget did not look like – and that he as Treasurer did not face the same harrowing choices – as one of Wayne Swan’s, was the mammoth and sustained surges in the prices of our exports of coal, gas and iron ore.

Just 14 months ago then-treasurer Josh Frydenberg forecast company tax would deliver $90bn this fiscal year just ending; his successor now says it will raise – in just one year – a staggering $48bn more to $138bn.

The extra, and indeed a good part of that original $90bn base, is coming from resources exports.

Imagine if that $48bn hadn’t arrived?

We would have been having a very different conversation since Tuesday night over a budget with a massive deficit, and massive deficits into the future.

We would have been having that conversation over a very different budget in which Dr Jim would have had to make very, very different and almost all unpalatable choices.

Indeed, we will probably be having exactly that conversation over the Victorian state budget, in two weeks; with Victoria lacking the national resources inheritance, combined with a profligate government.

The other critical part of our extraordinary luck being sourced in volume resources like coal, gas and iron ore – and uranium, if we dared to grasp it – is twofold and also unrecognised, and certainly unheralded.

They are harvested far away, out of sight. Not for Australia, the vast sprawling factories of a China to despoil our liveable cities and sports and beach lifestyles.

Secondly, we don’t have to “give up anything” to earn the foreign exchange to buy all “that stuff” from those Chinese factories, and to feed revenues into the budget.

We don’t have to forgo using at home, especially the iron ore but also the coal. There’s plenty to sate our demand and reap those foreign trillions.

Gas is more complicated because “we” have chosen not to find, develop and use it at home; and we are embarked on doing the same with coal.

Indeed, “we” want to close it all down.

So, what will 2035’s treasurer build his or her budget on?