EDITORIAL: How did this week go so horribly wrong for Albo?

This should have been an easy week for Anthony Albanese.

It started off promising for the Government, with news the ACCC was taking Coles and Woolworths to court over allegations the big supermarkets were ripping off customers by duping them with fake discounts. Someone else for the populace, squeezed to breaking point by the cost-of-living crisis, to blame and in easily understandable terms.

And then there were the inflation figures. They showed that headline inflation was finally down to 2.7 per cent, within the Reserve Bank’s target band of between 2 and 3 per cent needed by the central bank to justify a long-awaited cut to the cash rate.

Even ignoring the headline figure, as the RBA will be given it is an artificially low figure bought by State and Federal governments through household electricity rebates, it was positive news.

The underlying inflation figure, on which the bank relies, also showed inflation slowing. The ABS figures showed it was at 3.4 per cent in August. Not enough for a rate cut, but a significant improvement on the first half of the year, when it stubbornly ran at 4.4 per cent.

Jim Chalmers was in China, the first Australian treasurer to do so in seven years and he might even come home with a win on trade tariffs on rock lobsters. And with Sydney about to take on Brisbane in the AFL grand final, the entire country — even the rugby league States — has its mind on what’s about to unfold at the MCG anyway.

So how did a week where so many things were lining up perfectly go so horribly wrong for the Government?

The Prime Minister is cursed with the anti-Midas touch. Everything he touches turns to calamity.

The conversation on the inflation numbers was overtaken by talk of the Government’s trickery, and Dr Chalmers’ stoush with the RBA as to whether it’s interest rates or inflation causing the greater hurt to Australians.

We saw the return of a long-dead taxation zombie when it came to light that Treasury was running the numbers on changes to negative gearing.

Who had asked for the work to be done? At first, no one apparently. Just Treasury boffins doing what Treasury boffins do. That the work was undertaken at all appeared to catch even Mr Albanese unawares.

Eventually, after a few days of ambiguity and evasion, Dr Chalmers conceded the request originated from his department. Doing so — and then presumably leaking that he had done so — without the involvement of the Prime Minister calls to mind the constant briefings by then-treasurer Scott Morrison which so frustrated Malcolm Turnbull during his prime ministership. In his book, Mr Turnbull said the “counterproductive” habit of ventilating policy reform under consideration was “corrosive of good government”.

The end result of a week in which the Government has snatched defeat from the jaws of victory is an electorate confused and disengaged, and a Prime Minister looking increasingly like he is failing to stay afloat.