Piers Akerman: Treasurer’s smoke and mirrors budget will gloss over ALP’s role in ballooning debt
Jim Chalmers, no matter what he says Tuesday, is setting Australia up for a bleak future of fiscal dissolution and generational hardship, writes Piers Akerman.
Federal Budget
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Treasurer Jim Chalmers lacks his idol Paul Keating’s skills, intellect and his ability to intimidate the Canberra press gallery.
His budget this week will be a disaster and not just because it will be tailored solely to pump up Labor’s tyres before the May election.
All members of Anthony Albanese’s cabinet lack credibility.
Chalmers, who was tossed a PhD for his enthusiastic doctoral appreciation of Keating’s economics, has gaslighted the public with his claimed economic skills but the two surpluses he boasts have been due to factors beyond his control.
Even as Energy and Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen dreams the impossible dream of net zero, the economy has been boosted beyond expectation by record commodity export revenues, primarily coal and iron ore.
Our coal, plus some natural gas, have been fuelling the manufacturing economies of China and India, and to hell with global emission targets.
Idiotic Labor and Teal MPs believe they can maintain their carbon emission purity by exporting CO2 elsewhere.
It would shock them to learn that there is but one atmosphere surrounding Earth and that we all share its oxygen – Australians, Africans, Indians, Chinese, all humans – no matter where we live.
Chalmers won’t admit it but the cost of his government’s net zero fantasy is one of the largest contributors to inflation – with others being the prices for coal and iron ore – and that inflation has led to bracket creep which increases the amount of income tax flowing to Treasury which, in turn, permits him to claim a surplus.
Basing surpluses on such windfalls is not the basis of a sound economy but that’s something else Chalmers won’t mention Tuesday.
The cold reality is that the national debt is within striking distance of a trillion dollars, which amounts to approximately $37,000 per person.
Far from the sunny outlook which Chalmers will describe, this debt will be owed by Australians, their children and grandchildren, well into the future. Labor is not reining in the national debt, it is making it worse.
Because we’re stuck in an artificial no-man’s land waiting for Albanese to actually call an election rather than announce greater wasteful spending promises, we can’t expect the Opposition to lay out its plans to reduce the debt and boost productivity to get Australia back on track. Unless the Coalition wins office, the budget won’t be brought back under control.
According to a recent OECD report, the decline in Australian household income is the worst among all developed nations. The worst.
One analysis calculates the real decline in household incomes as greater than 8.3 per cent.
The great drains on our economy are well known but instead of Labor addressing them, it has been doubling down on its wilfully increased public sector spending.
The NDIS is out of control and disastrously managed. The renewable energy rollout is another massive drain with the initial $2bn cost of Snowy 2.0 now revised to $12bn or more. Add the billions wasted on now-discarded green hydrogen plans, wind and solar factories, plus Teal and Green plans for offshore wind turbines (which can’t find backers), and there is nothing but an endless sea of red ink on the books.
The contrast between the economic policies of Chalmers and Keating could not be starker.
As loopy as some of Keating’s non-Treasury policies may have been, and as crazy as some of his current notions are (think China), the principles upon which he based his plans for the Australian economy were essentially sound.
Chalmers, no matter what he says Tuesday, is setting Australia up for a bleak future of fiscal dissolution and generational hardship under a Labor, Green and Teal pandemonium.
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Originally published as Piers Akerman: Treasurer’s smoke and mirrors budget will gloss over ALP’s role in ballooning debt
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