You’d have to be Caracas to vote these jokers in

Every policy proposal from Bill Shorten and Chris Bowen is an embarrassing cocktail of political naivete and policy incompetence.

Looked at in isolation each and indeed every policy proposal from Labor’s new dynamic duo, Bill Shorten and Chris Bowen, is an embarrassing cocktail of political naivete and policy incompetence. In combination they spell chaos and disaster: Venezuela here we come.

The latest is the undefined and unquantified “living wage”.

As a thought bubble, percolating out of an opposition leader’s cranium, it might be dismissed as: well, it’s just throwing cake crumbs to Labor’s base; surely, of course, Shorten would never actually let them eat cake.

Coming though from the man who will be prime minister in barely two months, and a PM with not just a massive majority in the lower house but a functional majority in the Senate with the Greens, it is or should be a matter of fundamental and indeed even existential concern.

Just by itself, unmoored from the portfolio of other Labor proposals, or even unmoored just from the economic environment that is likely to prevail, it is a policy designed to destroy much of the small and medium business sector, end any prospect of new employment growth and send the ranks of the jobless soaring.

Then if you do add either those other proposals or the very real likelihood that we will be moving into stormy economic seas, whether by our own doing as a consequence of a collapse in the property market, or with cold winds blowing in from the north, and the northeast, and even the northwest — or all of them — the blood of any rational person should freeze.

The living wage is one thing; the big new thing. But as they say, there’s more; oh yes, there is much, much more.

There’s the quartet of taxes intended to raise somewhere between $200 billion and $300bn in the greatest assault we will have ever seen in this country on the capital formation process and investment.

They are the abolition of future negative gearing on existing properties, the doubling of capital gains tax on future-acquired assets, the termination of the refunding of excess franking credits, and the taxing of discretionary trust distributions.

Once implemented we are likely to see a perverse inverse version of killing two birds with one stone. The policies will be so effective at damaging if not destroying the targets that far from raising $200bn plus, future governments will be lucky to get even $100bn.

So a PM Shorten and a treasurer Bowen will have scored the double of killing investment and sending the budget straight back into structural deficit.

Some action in each of these areas is, as I have written, entirely justified both as good policy and rational politics.

But Shorten — or is it all Bowen, the man who is on the record as believing Wayne Swan was one of our best treasurers? — seems to have gone out of his way to select the particular policy that is the most inept. And obviously and embarrassingly so.

By all means set limits on negative gearing. But instead they’ve opted to channel future investors into the worst possible areas — off-the-plan apartments and fringe city dogboxes or shoddy McMansions.

While also “advising” people to pour more and more money into the totally tax-sheltered family home. Is persuading people to put even more money into their home really the avenue for building a more productive society?

The Shorten-Bowen idiocy on negative gearing does, though, knit “perfectly” with the proposed changes to franking credits and capital gains tax. Prune any holding you have in companies paying franked dividends and upgrade your tax-free home.

Did I say there’s more? The really big one is Labor’s plan to go for broke on reducing emissions of carbon dioxide. For, of course, absolute zero benefit.

It cannot change the temperature by even a ten-thousandth of a degree; it cannot save even one-thousandth of the Barrier Reef; it cannot stop even one-hundredth of the (non-existent) extra future hurricanes.

All it could do, is to import many more solar panels, wind turbines and batteries from China: all made by burning more and more of our coal — or, our seeming increasing preference, someone else’s; but either way pumping much more CO2 than we will have averted.

Like an enthusiastic schoolboy, the man who would be Swan Mark II has just discovered this magical statistical beast: the “per capita”. After the GDP figures surfaced, Bowen’s zinger was to claim we were in a “per capita recession”.

Put aside the tiresome childish stupidity of the basic concept he was working off — the so-called (ridiculous) “technical recession” of two successive quarters of negative growth rendered even more silly by trying to extend it to the per capita level.

But, where this is very, very relevant is in terms of those CO2 cuts.

Because of our (crazy) population growth, the 45 per cent cut proposed by Labor is more like 55 per cent in per capita terms. That would make it easily the most punitive of any nation in the world; and all to be done in just 11 years.

Apart, perhaps, from Norway with its combination of hydropower and oil and gas exports which show up on someone else’s CO2 books.

Indeed, even the current government’s proposed 26-28 per cent CO2 cuts at more like 35 per cent in per capita terms are already among the most punitive proposed by any country.

Whichever, they will be delivered, because as more and more erratic renewable, for want of an alternative word, generation is added — whether or not batteries are included — coal-generation will be rendered unworkable the way the network and the CO2 mandation works.

We won’t see only the coal stations close that have to make way for wind and solar, but all of them. The kids will get what they have so carelessly wished for.

Why, come to think of it, we could pick our next cabinet at random from the ranks of yesterday and get a more rational, more informed one than is coming.