Jim Chalmers’ descent into abuse proves unworthy of a treasurer

Treasurer Jim Chalmers in Melbourne on Monday. Picture: Nadir Kinani

Jim Chalmers delivered the 2024 Curtin Oration on Monday evening. It’s a privilege for anyone to be invited to give a named lecture. Consequently, the text needs to be carefully constructed, partly in the knowledge that the speech will be read for many years into the future.

The Treasurer seems to have missed this widely accepted rule, delivering instead a long slab of personal invective against Peter Dutton. Talk about short-term politics, which has no place in a speech like this. It should be deeply insulting to the organisers of the oration, although their political colours are nailed firmly to the mast.

While Paul Keating is Chalmers’s hero, the Treasurer has decided to copy only one aspect of Keating’s performance as a political leader. To be sure, he was good at the insulting repartee, the colourful broadside against his political opponents. All tip and no iceberg, it’s like being flogged by a warm lettuce, soon he will be ­offering a free set of steak knives – they are all good lines.

But the much more interesting side of Keating was his skill as a reforming treasurer and his ability to communicate the case for change.

His appreciation of what was at stake and the need to sequence the actions required to achieve a competitive, open economy are what makes Keating a politician that should attract our admiration. Sadly, Chalmers is unaware of this much more significant part to Keating’s achievements.

The Curtin Oration delivered by Chalmers contains the usual chitchat about prime minister John Curtin, although this introduction simply fills in some time. The real aim of the oration is for Chalmers to write a job application for the top job while also scoring some cheap political points against the Opposition Leader.

But let’s face it, as far as job ­applications go, it’s a very poor one. Any decent recruitment algorithm would quickly put Chalmers’ submission in the reject pile.

What’s all this twaddle about the fourth economy? According to Jim the philosopher king, we started with the colonial era, then moved onto the protected industrial era and then we had the Bob and Paul days of opening the economy to competitive forces.

Chalmers is now championing the fourth economy, which is some weird mix of net zero, artificial intelligence, the care economy, being in a good region and having an entrepreneurial government implementing the Future Made in Australia suite of policies.

If it all sounds a bit incoherent, it is. It’s also not good retail politics.

I use the term “entrepreneurial government” deliberately – OK, I might get a laugh from some readers – because Chalmers is clearly very influenced by controversial economist Mariana Mazzucato. She wrote a whole book entitled The Entrepreneurial State: ­Debunking Public versus Private Sector Myths.

Let’s be clear here, her views are not widely accepted within the economics profession.

She talks about governments being risk-takers and market shapers. Others would describe most governments (and the public servants who serve them) as irresponsible blockers whose main aim is to hold office and to avoid accountability.

Chalmers also makes a weak claim to be responsibly managing the budget even though the two surpluses would have occurred whoever was in government and his May budget is forecasting four substantial budget deficits in a row. But the key fact is that living standards, as measured by per capita real disposable incomes, have been going backwards under the Albanese-Chalmers government, something that he fails to mention in his speech.

The combination of rapid population growth caused by excessive immigration, negative productivity growth, and persistent inflation caused in part by government spending has led to this dismal outcome. While Chalmers always wants to appear empathetic by declaring that he feels everyone’s pain, he wilfully ignores the main contributors to this pain.

But the really disgraceful part of Chalmers’ presentation is the descent into political abuse. ­According to him, “leadership can help us become an island of ­decency and opportunity in a sea of uncertainty and division. (Pause for groan.) But leadership which is destructive, and divisive, is not ­really leadership at all. And that’s what we are seeing from Peter Dutton. He is the most divisive leader of a major political party in Australia’s modern history – and not by accident, by choice.”

By “divisive” Chalmers simply has in mind the fact that the ­Coalition doesn’t agree with much of what Labor is talking about or implementing.

He obviously prefers the Tweedledum-Tweedledee version of political discourse. In fact, Dutton is doing the country a service by differentiating the ­Coalition from Labor and calling out some of the issues that really matter to people, including ­national security, the housing ­crisis and cost-of-living pressures.