Treasurer Jim Chalmers ‘misleads’ parliament on Labor’s unemployment record

Treasurer Jim Chalmers has seriously misled Parliament. He must correct his, ahem, ‘mis-statement’.

Last Thursday he boasted that the last 15 months was the “the longest run of unemployment this low on record”. That only 18 times “in our history” had unemployment (sic) had a ‘3’ in front of it, and fifteen of those had been under this Prime Minister and this government.

How modest: why not “under this PM, this government and, ahem, this treasurer”?

The claim is simply false, coming from someone who ‘thinks’ Australian ‘history’ began in 1983 with the election of the Hawke-Keating government.

Let me inform the clueless Chalmers – and his equally clueless Treasury advisors – that Australia has previously had not just 18 months of unemployment this low, but more than 25 years of even lower jobless.

Reserve Bank data shows the jobless rate was lower than it is now – and, mostly, much lower – all the way from 1949 to 1974.

An RBA research paper detailed how over that entire period – close to 300 months in a row – the jobless rate averaged just 2 per cent.

Federal Treasurer Jim Chalmers during Question Time at Parliament House in Canberra. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Martin Ollman

For great slabs of that period, the jobless rate was actually under 1 per cent. That’s real full employment as we’ve never known since.

And almost all of that time was under the Menzies-led Coalition government. With the jobless rate beginning to rocket after the December 1972 election of the Whitlam-led Labor government.

Indeed, the Menzies government had, famously, almost lost the “Credit Squeeze” 1961 election, when the jobless rate kicked up to just over – wait for it – 3 per cent.

With Whitlam, the jobless rate went to around 6 per cent and there it stayed until it went above 10 per cent under the Hawke-Keating, ahem, Labor government at the end of the 1980s.

It is of course utterly fatuous for Chalmers to claim the credit for the low jobless rate. It was already baked in under the Morrison government (and Lowe RBA).

The new Labor PM and treasurer just inherited it. Just like they inherited the booming resources-fuelled (one-off) budget surplus.

It’s also the case that two can play that game. Take inflation.

In “our entire, Chalmers-style, history” of the last 30 or so years, inflation has only been a punishing 6 per cent or higher for 24 months of that period, and 15 of those months have been under this PM, this government and, yes, this treasurer.

Further and more damningly of our Keating 2.0 Lite, is how badly – Chalmers has performed, measured by the so-called ‘Misery Index’.

The ‘Misery Index’ adds the inflation and jobless rates.

In the last 30 or so years – excluding the artificial and temporary blip from the introduction of the GST in 2000 - the Misery Index has only been 10 per cent or higher for nine months, and all of those nine months were under this PM, this government and this treasurer.

The last time it was higher – much higher, over 15 per cent – was under another Labor treasurer, one Paul Keating in early 1990.

Thank you, Jim for reminding us that Labor almost literally means Misery.