PAUL MURRAY: Albo has last faith in his Treasurer and there’s a ready-made replacement waiting in the wings

At the start of the year, this column posed a question to long-suffering Australians: Are you tired of Jim Chalmers yet?

“Tired of his excuses for the economic harm his policies are causing? Tired of his relentless political spin?”

The response to that simple question seemed to be little more than a shrug from most quarters, even though One Nation’s splenetic rise in the opinion polls was under way by then.

But what about now? The economy is clearly tanking and it’s much more obvious that the Treasurer is unable or unwilling to do anything meaningful about it.

Even Prime Minister Anthony Albanese seems to have lost faith in Chalmers with persistent media reports he consistently undermines and over-rides him.

But the man with a doctorate in spin continues to obfuscate about achieving positive outcomes without delivering. All the while blaming someone else — usually overseas.

With his back to the wall and the intensely political Albanese openly running out of patience, Chalmers has resorted to the one thing he can do: blather.

In a classically them-and-us speech to the radically left-wing Australia Institute on Tuesday, Chalmers revealed his true self, urging “progressives” not to adopt “smug moral superiority” over working class people unhappy with Labor’s governing.

While doing precisely that. His lack of self-awareness is staggering.

“When a significant swathe of our fellow Australians find that message of returning to an idealised version of the good old days appealing — we shouldn’t turn on them,” Chalmers said. “Our role as progressives is not to scold those who see appeal in that message. It’s not to mock them or ‘cancel’ them or talk down to them.

“In fact, the true mission of serious progressives is as old as liberal democracy itself, and it comes in two halves. One half is to persuade people that despite the visceral appeal of returning to the past — that this is not actually possible.”

That crap suggests workers are so dumb that the ideologues and managerialists who comprise propaganda outfits like the Australia Institute could convince us that the decline we are experiencing is actually progress.

It mangles the reality that when people like Pauline Hanson talk about getting our country back, they are not proposing a retreat to the past. They just want to wrench our future from the hands of people like Chalmers who are destroying it.

“The other half of our mission is this: to persuade working people that the path we advocate, the path we haven’t walked before is actually the safer, more secure and more prosperous path for them and their loved ones,” Chalmers said.

“Them” and us. A Labor Treasurer now speaks of “working people” as “them”. Because modern Labor sides with the elites.

What could be more smug and morally superior than that? Caring progressives comforting less-educated workers that their future is in good hands. Trust us. Orwellian.

And check this from a politician whose government bangs on about being led by “the science” on all things: “We have all the facts to push back on this, but facts don’t beat feelings. Feelings are as real as facts.”

Sorry, Mr Nineteen Eighty-Four, but that’s bullshit. They’re not. Feelings are a subjective state of mind. They should ideally be rooted in facts, which are sacred.

Chalmers’ dross could only come from someone who doesn’t value the truth. With a meaningless doctorate in the political dark arts.

This week the International Monetary Fund predicted Australia would continue to have a world-leading inflation rate — a contest no one wants to win — well into next year.

It warned that the government’s spending at a four-decade high, except for the pandemic years, had to be reined in. It further downgraded its forecasts for Australia’s economic growth next year to just 1.6 per cent, from an expected 2 per cent two years ago.

“For countries with above-target inflation or elevated underlying inflationary pressures, fiscal consolidation can moderate demand and complement monetary policy efforts to maintain price stability,” the IMF said.

Fiscal consolidation is when a government deliberately reduces its budget deficit and slows the growth of public debt by cutting spending, increasing taxes, or both.

The bit about complementing monetary policy means helping the Reserve Bank in its charter responsibility to keep inflation within the 2-3 per cent band.

Both points were a repudiation of Chalmers’ persistent refusal to accept that his spending is driving up inflation and weakening the effectiveness of the RBA’s painful cash rate increases.

That early February column was published months before Chalmers produced the worst Federal Budget in living memory. Ridiculously, 22 weeks down the track, the Government is still trying to find people to “consult” to fix the Treasurer’s mess.

Competent political practice is to consult before a Budget and to have it forgotten within a fortnight.

Chalmers has finally done something on tax reform, one of the column’s complaints in February, but nearly all of it is wrong with unintended consequences more harmful than any good flowing from the “rebalancing” of the housing market.

The Reserve Bank’s inflation-busting decision last month to increase interest rates again was a bitter blow to many sectors of the national economy, most noticeably mortgage-holders, but also to businesses which are struggling under the debt burden.

It took the cash rate to a 15-year high of 4.6 per cent, marking the fourth rise this year and the 16th since Labor came to power four years ago.

It is undeniable that the fighting in the Middle East is forcing up fuel prices and thereby adding to inflation.

But it is also undeniable that we would have been in a much better position to deal with that pressure if Chalmers had joined the bank’s fight against inflation years ago instead of repeatedly increasing spending when the circumstances demanded the opposite.

The Albanese Government is now paying for the Treasurer’s sins of commission (a glaringly incompetent Budget) and omission (the failure to deal adequately with inflation and productivity).

Chalmers must also share the blame for the pain caused by the spate of interest rate increases underway.

The RBA’s interest rate cut just before the 2025 election — and the two that followed shortly after, which made it appear less politically dodgy than it was — looks very suspect in hindsight.

The inflation monster was not beaten when the cash rate was dropped from 4.35 per cent to 4.1 just three weeks before the May 3 poll.

That decision was the first taken by the RBA’s new monetary policy board after Chalmers’ restructured the bank’s operations and appointed every one of the six members.

A less-political group would have been more cautious about endangering the bank’s independence by tacit interference in a looming election — a decision that was clearly wrong and which has inflicted more pain for longer on Australians.

Chalmers’ hand-picked group then cut twice to 3.6 per cent by December. The cash rate is now one whole percentage point higher in an attempt to fix the mess those bad decisions caused.

If that’s not bad enough, the Albanese Government’s senior figures have been revealed in a recent series of recent blunders as clueless about how the main driver of our economy – business – works to deliver prosperity.

Albanese sought earlier this month to make political mileage from an RBA decision, over which he had no authority, on ending merchant credit card surcharges. He went all populist with a social media video telling people their daily takeaway coffee would be cheaper as a result.

The Prime Minister couldn’t see that businesses would still have to pay their bank’s transaction fee on that cup of coffee and without the surcharge would just pass on that cost to customers with price rises. No clue.

While Chalmers also stupidly thought businesses would absorb the charges, he was caught completely flat-footed when the tax office decided it wouldn’t, despite being under his portfolio control. No idea how it would impact businesses until too late.

And let’s not forget Trade Minister Don Farrell suggesting the government should direct superannuation funds to unblock an impasse over lamb exports to the US.

“Australian superannuation funds have an obligation to the national interest, to represent the national interest, and to make sure that their investments in the US are boosting Australian trade,” Senator Farrell said.

It is truly alarming that such a senior minister doesn’t realise that the superannuation industry’s sole responsibility is maximising the retirement savings of workers.

But it’s part of a bigger picture about a government out of touch with economic reality — with no collegiate experience of how business operates — and driven by socialist ideology.

Albanese has a ready-made successor to Chalmers in factionally unaligned Parramatta MP Andrew Charlton, a Rhodes scholar with a real doctorate in economics and a fortune made in the private sector.

A change of treasurer can’t come soon enough.