Jim Chalmers is the biggest casualty of super debacle

Arguably the most serious consequence from the superannuation debacle is the evisceration of treasurer Jim Chalmers as the key political and policy player in the Albanese Labor Government.

To put it more simply, it has become all too-painfully obvious that: treasurer, I knew Paul Keating; treasurer, you are no Paul Keating. That’s to say, someone who, now, post-debacle, is likely either to drive and more importantly deliver serious and significant policy change, or to frame the political debate.

As Keating did, on both fronts, through those crucial years at the end of the 1980s and into the 1990s. Yes, including the “recession we had to have”, warts and all.

But also, the Prices and Incomes Accord that – oh so ironically – created the very superannuation system over which our modern-day Keating acolyte has stumbled so badly. Also too, the “doing slowly” of then opposite leader John Hewson, which enabled Keating to win his unwinnable election, after that ‘recession wart’, in 1993.

Now true, and of equally critical importance, there is no modern-day Bill Kelty – the trade union pivot of the Hawke-Keating Government’s policy and political dynamic around the Accord. One might equally say: Sally, ACTU secretary Sally McManus, I knew Bill Kelty; Sally you ain’t no Bill.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Now, it might have been something of a hopeful fantasy on my part, but coming into the election last May, I saw Chalmers as the all-important – at least, potential – bulwark against the prime minister’s ignorance and Chris Bowen’s enthusiastic idiocy.

That hope is now well and truly shattered. Be afraid, be really afraid, as Bowen runs mindlessly amok, closing coal-fired power stations, hindering or halting new gas ones, and putting all his faith – and your ability to keep your lights on – in wind and solar and mythical unicorn-style batteries. Now true, Chalmers, at least on the surface, is as equally ‘signed-on’ to the anti-energy climate lunacy.

But he did – at least, to me – show indications that sanity and just plain reality had a chance of breaking through into his mind; where there was no hope with Bowen, and Albanese was both a metaphoric and literal ‘absentee landlord’, so to speak. That while the fiscal team of Chalmers and finance minister Katy Gallagher couldn’t hold a candle to that of Keating and (Peter) Walsh, they did offer the best hope of some counterweight to government careening right off the rails. So, sadly then, we see Chalmers himself directly doing some of that careening, with a monumentally inept performance over super – and indeed the possibility of doing so, pretty much across the board, implicit in and intrinsic to the so-called Tax Expenditures Statement.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Gary Ramage

As I noted yesterday, it has to be pretty humiliating for a treasurer to have to be bailed out by a PM who – when asking for the job – didn’t know the RBAs policy rate or indeed the jobless rate. But it’s the consequences rather than the embarrassment itself that matters. No-one, from the PM down, is going to have to take Chalmers seriously around the cabinet table. That might be bad for the treasurer, it’s just terrible for the country – even at the best of times.

Apart from the climate insanity and the boyish, twerpish, enthusiasm of Bowen – a trait that he fully shares with NSW’s boy-minister Matt Kean – separated at birth, anyone? - we are not headed into the best of times, either globally or domestically. Interest rates; inflation; energy supplies and prices; the US economy and Wall St both teetering on the brink; and of course our biggest trading partner China, for the moment, propping everything up with all the money it’s pouring into Australia. We need a treasurer on top of his game, confident, assertive and both respected and dominant in cabinet.

We’ve got, well……