When you’re a middle-class arts/law graduate whose spent your entire life on the public dime, it’s easy to recline in the safety of the Canberra bubble and wonder, ‘Crisis? What crisis?’ Out in the real world, Australian voters are grappling with the grim reality of the cost-of-living crisis daily.
Whatever budget magic Jim Chalmers is looking to conjure, there is one undeniable economic fact that continues to undermine the Albanese government’s central message.
No other developed nation in the world has suffered a decline in living standards anywhere near the magnitude of Australia.
Partly this is the economic ‘long Covid’ left behind by hysterical government overreaction and the nonsensical delusion that entire economies could be ‘paused’ without devastating consequences. Not to mention racking up hundreds of billions in debt.
But the killer blow has been the elite’s utter dependence on unchecked mass immigration and Labor’s demented ‘Net Zero’ policies. The former has directly led to the critical housing shortage and overburdened infrastructure, the latter is sending energy prices – and hence the prices of everything – through the roof.
And that didn’t change with the release of the national accounts last week. No amount of boasting that the household recession had finally come to an end can alter the reality.
Fresh OECD data, in the form of updated data sets on household income, shows that even after the marginally better but still grim economic news, Australia’s living standards continue to be the worst in the world. And there is no bounce-back coming soon, at least not within this decade.
Australia remains the outlier by a large margin compared to its peers.
Voters are going to have that at the front of their minds when they head to polls in the next month or so.
Politicians can argue the toss over the numbers and their interpretation […] but the reality is that it is what households feel that matters during an election campaign.
And how they are feeling may not necessarily fit with what the Albanese government is telling them about how they should feel.
This is the danger for Chalmers and Anthony Albanese as the election looms.
We’re not the only country badly off, of course, even if we’re copping it hardest right now. But there’s something noticeable about the countries doing just as bad.
By way of comparison, Denmark was the second-worst in decline of living standards due to inflation. But at 2.8 per cent it hardly came close to Australia.
Sweden, the Czech Republic and Finland were the only other countries in negative territory.
So, it includes all of the left’s beloved ‘socialist’ Scandinavian states. They’re not actually socialist, of course, but they are characterised by massive welfare states. Greece was once even worse, but under the enforced austerity of a decade ago, it’s turned around remarkably.
It wasn’t that long ago that Greece was regarded as the basket case economy of Europe.
Yet it has experienced a rise in living standards of close to 10 per cent over the same period, according to the OECD.
When Greece is outshining you economically, you really have screwed up.
So, what’s Labor’s re-election plan? More welfare.
A committee hand-picked by Jim Chalmers to advise on economic and social inclusion has urged Labor to massively increase welfare spending in the March 25 budget, arguing renters and those on benefits are falling behind in the cost-of-living crisis.
Big. Surprise. Just look at who’s on this committee.
The committee, chaired by former deputy Labor leader Jenny Macklin, recommended the government “substantially increase the base rates of Jobseeker and related working age payments”.
The committee also includes ACTU secretary Sally McManus, economist Angela Jackson and Australian Council of Social Service chief executive Cassandra Goldie.
It initially included a representative from the Business Council of Australia, but the lobby group’s chief executive, Bran Black, quit last year as it was too focused on welfare.
Life-long guzzlers at the taxpayer-funded trough, all. Well, if they can get rich by sucking down other peoples’ money, why can’t everyone else.
Such is the absolute clown show running this country.
