Massive budget debts looming and a punishing, union-stroking, and over-regulation killing businesses. Hey, ho… tell me this isn’t a Labor government.
The only remarkable thing about Australian Treasurer Jim Chalmers’ two back-to-back surpluses is that anyone was ever hoodwinked into believing it was down to Zippy’s chops as an economist. Remember that “Dr Chalmers’” qualifications are in communications and political “science”.
Chalmers too obviously just got lucky, falling into government just in time to preside over a triple windfall of a new spike in Chinese demand for iron ore, the Ukraine war driving up gas prices and the sugar-hit of record-high immigration. The result was an unexpected $360bn boost.
Chalmers is blowing the lot.
Updated forecasts by leading economist Chris Richardson show spending levels returning to Covid pandemic highs and an expectation cash headline deficits will total $220bn between now and mid-2028 amid “increasingly dodgy” off-budget expenditure.
After the Treasurer banked back-to-back surpluses totalling $37.9bn […] Mr Richardson has declared Australia’s “budgetary luck is running out” and is forecasting underlying cash deficits to be at least $10bn worse off by 2027–28.
Meanwhile Chalmers is adding $104bn in spending while raising just $44bn in taxes. You don’t have to be Mr Micawber to foresee a result of misery.
The new data comes as Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton embark on an informal election blitz of battleground seats this week, with both leaders selling their credentials on economic management ahead of a federal poll that could be as early as next March.
Ahead of the release of national accounts data on Wednesday, which is expected to reveal the economy grew by a paltry 0.4 per cent in the September quarter, commonwealth monthly financial statements last week revealed the budget was running a $23bn deficit at the end of October.
Meanwhile, iron ore prices are slipping and maintaining immigration at the levels of the past decade is one move guaranteed to send voters white-hot with fury. At the same time, Labor’s NDIS is an all-consuming behemoth.
And still, for all Chalmers’ crowing about economic management, voters are being belted with a cost-of-living crisis worse than even recent recessions.
At the same time, yet another Labor policy – a personal pet of Albanese, made solely to pander to the big unions – is screwing Australian businesses.
Australian industry is being crippled by coastal voyage rules Anthony Albanese originally devised to prop up the country’s faltering domestic shipping sector, businesses have warned […]
In some cases, moving freight from one Australian state to another can be only marginally more expensive than sending a product overseas and back again on the same ship.
Indeed, Tasmanian paper mill Norske Skog canvassed exactly that option to get newsprint from Hobart to Sydney. The company seriously considered shipping its paper from Hobart to Auckland, unloading it for a day (to meet requirements), then shipping it back to Sydney.
In what Clown World is such a crazy deal even feasible?
Introduced by then transport minister Anthony Albanese in 2012 in a bid to revitalise the Australian shipping industry, the cabotage laws require foreign vessel owners to acquire a temporary licence from the government and pay “top-up” wages to their crews when picking up cargo at one Australian port and taking it to another.
It is intended to ensure the competitiveness of Australian shipping companies paying higher local wages. But the Australian fleet has continued to fall since the legislation was introduced.
Australia’s shipping fleet fell from 55 registered major trading ships in 1996 to 21 in 2011 and has since dropped further to nine.
He was from the government and he was there to help.
