There are good politicians and there are good economists. But the combination of the two in one person is rare. Paul Keating was one example; Peter Costello another.
Jim Chalmers is a good retail politician. He is an effective communicator and, with the resources of an entire department behind him, he generally doesn’t fluff his economic lines. That said, he has no feel for economics, let alone for responsible budget management.
He is also very tricky with the figures. Just because something was forecast three years ago in the pre-election economic and fiscal outlook does not give him a licence to compare the actual outcomes and conclude the government has performed well. Everyone understands the PEFO was unreliable, even at the time, and is now completely irrelevant.
Chalmers’ ridiculous claim that the Labor government “has got the debt down by $177bn” is just plain wrong. Actual government debt has gone up by $50bn under Chalmers’ watch. And let’s be clear on another point: gross government debt next financial year will be over $1 trillion.
Angus Taylor is a much superior economist to Chalmers. He has a deep education in the field, has worked in applied economics for many years and has run a very successful pastoral business with his brothers. He is not a natural politician.
When it comes to the debate between the two money men, the expectation was that Chalmers would outperform Taylor because of Chalmers’ superior communications skills and his ability to rattle off misleading figures that supposedly underpin the proposition that the Coalition is planning “secret cuts”. In fact, Chalmers seemed a bit off his game because Taylor was not prepared to allow him to get away with this ruse.
(The $600bn bill for nuclear energy that Chalmers repeats as often as he can is simply made up and would have no impact on anything that occurs for very many years, in any case.)
The bottom line was that there were no knockout points for either Chalmers or Taylor, although the differences in approach to managing the economy of the two sides of politics were highlighted. Taylor managed to bat away many of the scary points that Chalmers wanted to land. It was a clear win to Taylor.
But with the cloud of the Trump tariffs hanging over the economy at the moment, the real worry is that there are insufficient buffers in the budget to accommodate what may happen, particularly if there is a major downturn in global trade.
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