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# The Voters Have Only Encouraged Him
- URL: https://goodoil.news/the-voters-have-only-encouraged-him/
- Published: 2026-10-10T01:30:03.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-10T01:30:02.000Z
- Description: If Zippy is bankrupting our country, it’s only because he’s following the votes.
- Author: Lushington Brady
- Tags: AUS Politics, Economy

As **Benjamin Franklin** apocryphally said, “When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.” Australians may have repeatedly rejected a republic, both at opinion polls and a referendum, but a great many leaners have realised that they can vote themselves money. Other people’s money of course: and, as is inevitable, it’s running out.

That isn’t stopping the leaner class from voting to grab all they can. A greedy vote our socialist Labor government is only too happy to indulge.

> [As much as economists](https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/coalition-voters-join-chorus-for-more-government-spending-on-cost-of-living/news-story/5d8c0d30084dbf6cc928dfd5585d03fb?ref=goodoil.news) may have been trying to educate a lay public on the perils of government spending during an inflation crisis, a thumping majority of voters don’t seem to care.  
>  
> And it’s not just Labor voters who are indulging the handout mentality, Coalition voters are in on the act too.

That was before last year’s election. It apparently didn’t occur to the 83 per cent who supported more government spending to help with cost-of-living pressures that the ‘support’ is nothing but their own money getting churned through layers of government bureaucracy, losing value at every turn. Nor that the more they demand the government shower them with their own laundered money, the higher that drives inflation, which drives up the cost of living.

The economic chickens are coming home to roost and they’re bringing a flock of pain with them.

Treasurer **Jim Chalmers** cuts an increasingly unconvincing, sweating figure under the harsh lights of his own economic mismanagement. While a frustrated populace would no doubt cheer if the keys to the Treasury were abruptly yanked from his grasp, pinning all our fiscal woes entirely on one beleaguered minister misses the mark. Chalmers and his colleagues are merely dancing to the tune piped by an electorate that has been thoroughly conditioned to expect a government-funded cushion for every stubbed toe and rising grocery bill.

This tragicomic entitlement was laid bare by polling data on the eve of the 2025 federal election, revealing an astonishing alignment across party lines. It was not merely a faction of hard-left dependents demanding state benevolence: the infection had thoroughly seized the supposedly conservative opposition as well.

Of course, the cheerleaders of big government will point to external bugbears – global supply shocks, turbulent energy markets and a chronic domestic productivity drought – to explain away the inflationary bonfire. Even the RBA chair has rubbished these excuses, because the limited damaged inflicted by these forces is merely stoked by the reckless fiscal incontinence practised by both major parties in Canberra. When an economy is already bumping against its productive limits, pumping billions more into aggregate demand is akin to dousing a chip-pan fire with kerosene.

To find intellectual clarity amidst this modern morass, one must look back half a century to the sage warnings of **Milton Friedman**. Fifty years ago, during the dark days of the **Gough Whitlam** administration’s stagflation disaster, the great monetarist touched down in Sydney to warn Australians against the seductive fallacy of deficit-financed benevolence. As Friedman so astutely observed:

> [“The great defect](https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/why-voters-must-be-told-a-harsh-truth-about-public-spending/news-story/4daa72f0be70a81d3bd06e370f7dfb76?ref=goodoil.news) in much of our policies in my country and yours, is not because bad people want to do bad things … it’s good people who want to do good things, who produce harm by accepting what is a fallacious principle – namely, that you can do good by spending somebody else’s money.”

There is no magical pudding from which infinite handouts can be sliced without consequence. Every dollar redistributed by Canberra must ultimately be clawed back via higher taxes, crushing public debt, or – as the Reserve Bank desperately tries to slam the brakes – punishing interest rates that bleed mortgage-holders dry.

Until the Australian electorate confronts the austere reality that you cannot spend your way out of a crisis born of overspending, our politicians will continue to pander to the lowest common denominator. The ledger always balances in the end and the bill is coming due.

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