Should Australia revise its constitution to provide for recall elections? This was the question pondered recently by a Sydney accounting boss, increasingly frustrated and infuriated by the ruinous antics of the Albanese government.
A recall election is a procedure by which voters can remove an elected official from office through a referendum before that official’s term of office has ended. Politicians, a class who largely seem to exist solely to serve themselves, of course are determined to “rule unsullied by elections”, as poet Les Murray so ably put it. So any prospect of such a referendum ever being allowed is about as likely as Anthony Albanese telling the truth. ‘A recipe for chaos!’ they’d no doubt screech, ignoring that Japan allows recall elections and has such political stability that the same party have ruled almost unbroken since WWII.
So, why is a Sydney bean-counter so hot under the collar that she would want to remove a sitting PM? Accountants are not exactly known for being a hot-headed bunch: outside of a really good spreadsheet, it takes a lot to get them worked up. But, like a great many Australians, the current mob in Canberra have sure got her dander up.
Hripsime Demirdjian, the founder of Hive Wise, has committed the cardinal sin of the modern era: she noticed that the emperor has no clothes and she pointed it out on the internet for all to see. Her viral dispatch from the front lines of small business agony was a refreshing, albeit entirely predictable, eruption of common sense against the desiccated husk of the Canberra machine.
“I think we’ve all now come to the conclusion and hopefully realisation that this government, this one here, does not know what they are doing and they are not fit to be running this country,” Ms Demirdjian said.
Millions of her fellow Australians would agree. It is a peculiar tragedy of our age that a woman who understands the basic mechanics of profit and loss is treated as a radical insurgent, while the political caste, resolute strangers to a hard day’s work in the private sector and whose only talent is the efficient incineration of public treasure, sits in the big chair with an air of unearned authority.
Demirdjian, a former KPMG advisor, naturally finds the credentials of our current economic managers somewhat lacking. She correctly identifies that when you put men who have never held a real job in charge of the nation, you get exactly what you deserve: mismanagement, profligacy and a tax policy that seems designed by a committee of sadists.
“Our own Prime Minister only has a Bachelor of Economics and never actually worked in the real business world. And what’s even worse is that our Treasurer, Jim Chalmers, has a Bachelor of Arts. The person in this country who is in charge of running the fiscal policy has an arts degree. Not an economics degree, or an accounting degree, or a law degree. An arts degree.”
It is, as Thomas Sowell wisely observed, “hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong”. Yet, that’s exactly the system we’ve wound up with. We’ve entrusted our fiscal destiny to a man whose highest qualification is, in effect, knowing how to interpret postmodern poetry, rather than the ability to balance a ledger. It explains everything. The endless tax hikes, the bewildering regulatory spaghetti, the sheer, unadulterated contempt for the productive class – it is all the work of men who think economics is just another form of identity politics.
The accountant rightfully observes that if any private enterprise operated with the level of deceit and incompetence displayed by this cabinet, the corporate regulator would have them in irons before the morning coffee run.
“Let’s not forget about all the lies and broken election promises of this government,” she fumed.
“That alone should get you kicked out of parliament and put right into jail. If any business or company lied the way that this government did, the ACCC would be cracking down on them like there’s no tomorrow for deceptive and misleading conduct.”
Indeed. But in the sanctum of Parliament House, mendacity is not a liability: it is the currency of the realm. The Albanese government functions less like a legislative body and more like a hostile takeover firm, bleeding the nation’s assets dry while assuring us that we are in a golden age of prosperity.
While Demirdjian was busy stating the bleedin’ obvious on social media (which would probably get her arrested in Britain), the treasurer was elsewhere, engaging in his preferred pastime: the frantic manufacture of a parallel reality. At the Citi A50 forum, Jim Chalmers was busy patting himself on the back, spruiking Australia’s economic trajectory as though he were the architect of a new miracle, rather than the steward of a slow-motion crash.
Demirdjian, unlike the treasurer, has a job that requires her to be right. Chalmers only requires that he be re-elected. And therein lies the fundamental incompatibility between those who build the nation and those who merely feed off its corpse.
