Jim Chalmers’ flights of fancy are economic fairy tales

Jim Chalmers seeks to set himself up as one of the great economic thinkers of our times. He’s anything but.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers at a press conference at Parliament House in Canberra.

Oh dear and I thought our only ‘problem’ was that we had yet another trainee treasurer – given to shooting off his mouth, with unwise, and utterly untrue, pronouncements like “inflation is out of control”.

Now we discover - heck, he’s chosen to shove it down our throats - that he’s a trainee with teenage-style, Thunberg-level, delusions of grandeur and profundity.

Heck again, ‘delusions’ doesn’t begin to capture it: why our very own Jim Chalmers knows how to completely remake our entire economic system and way of life to deliver something that’s defeated generations

Almost literally Nirvana on Earth, or at least Australia.

Chalmers aims to take us enthusiastically back to 1789 and 1917 and 1958 futures, all wrapped up together in embarrassingly simplistic 21st century naiveté, breathtaking ignorance and utter lack of even a smidgen of self-awareness.

Drawing on his vast knowledge and even greater experience - why, he’s spent over 20 years, almost every day since he emerged from university, in the backrooms and bowels, plenty of bowels, of the Labor Party and even ministerial offices indeed.

Remember our greatest-ever treasurer - until, I have to add, Sunday May 22 last year: Wayne ‘Four Surpluses’ Swan?

Well, what you probably didn’t know, is that Chalmers was ‘a’ and even ‘the’ principal advisor to Swan through Swan’s entire six years of mastery of our economy, the federal budget and the myriad of deep and complex challenges an ugly world threw at us.

It’s a good thing that second rate economists like Friedman, Schumpeter and even the (formerly) great Keynes are not still alive; to say nothing of political and philosophical (former) greats from Plato and Socrates, down through the Humes and Hegels and all the rest.

Why, they’d all have to, symbolically, hand in their pens, in supplication to the arrival of ‘the master’, with ‘the answer’; all wrapped up in 6000 words of turgid, trite, embarrassingly yet terrifyingly, verbal fairy-floss.

There’s no point, and I certainly have neither the time nor the interest, to deconstruct what Chalmers purports to offer.

Although, it’s clear he doesn’t have the most basic clue of what he is actually proposing – all the clichéd ineptitude of every totalitarian, of Soviet left and Fascist right, and the odd well-meaning Utopian fool, down through history.

Other than to note that the combination proffered by Chalmers - the government will spend more of your money and direct how you will spend what’s left - has always ended in tears, both metaphorical and indeed literal.

The great non-economist Abraham Lincoln captured it best: “it’s the same old serpent that says you work and I eat, you toil and I will enjoy the fruits of it”.

There are more immediate questions; they must be directed at our peripatetic PM, if necessary between flights of fancy overseas and visits to sporting events.

Incidentally, who says our PM needs a ‘Melbourne residence’?

Why, he seemingly has one in the plush executive, sponsor and general free-loader confines of Melbourne Park, taking up residence there from last Friday afternoon through to Monday morning?

Nevertheless, starting with question one: has the Treasurer just enunciated official Albanese Labor Government policy, starting with the ‘renovation’ of the Reserve Bank?

If so, whatever happened to ‘The Plan’, referred to repeatedly - at least 100 times by Albanese himself - through the campaign?

Is ‘The Plan’’ now, in that famous word from Nixon’s press secretary, Ron Ziegler: “inoperative”? More bluntly, defunct?

So, were we all lied to through the election campaign? Was it always intended that we be ambushed by this enthusiastically childish but dangerously toxic soviet-style command economy, with 21st century Dark Green and tech tinges?

Or is it all just another one of those ’good ideas’ - at no time, never - dreamed up by Chalmers over a summer holiday, Kevin 07-style?