The news that the Paris-based OECD has confirmed that Australia has suffered the biggest drop in living standards in two decades would be unknown to most Australians, including the voters in the recent Dunkley by-election.
Nor would they be aware of the expert view that there is little hope of an early recovery.
From a world leader two decades ago, we now underperform comparable countries in the OECD by close to 8 per cent.
This is not just bad luck.
This is the result of the agenda of the political class and other elites who first handed over manufacturing to Beijing, and who are now targeting both agriculture and mining.
They will never be satisfied until, as a result of their efforts, we follow Argentina into third-world status.
At Federation, Australians were, per capita, the world’s second-richest people. This wealth was shared more equally than in most countries. We are now the 20th, our ranking in constant decline.
Contrast Singapore. From an impoverished colony within living memory, Singaporeans are today more than twice as wealthy. With low taxes and widely available housing, their disposable income is double ours.
But instead of such truly crucial news, Dunkley electors and Australians at large, were informed in excruciating detail about Taylor Swift, including the fact she was watched from a free place by a dancing Prime Minister, who then flew on a CO2-emitting RAAF jet to an exclusive concert by Katy Perry in a Melbourne billionaire’s mansion, before flying back to Sydney to decide whether to appear at Sydney’s Mardi Gras.
Nor was there much in the news about funding terrorism or the careless handing out of visas to potential supporters of terrorism and even terrorists.
Macrobusiness.com.au and the Australian Financial Review excepted, there was even less news about the collapse in living standards, a matter unconventional economist Leith Van Onslelen discussed in detail on ADH TV on the Thursday evening before the election.
The election campaign also coincided with the news, played down in the political world and much of the media, that the climate catastrophist chickens have at last come home to roost, at least in relation to our nickel industry. As our leading geologist Ian Plimer pointed out recently on ADH TV, whenever he asks science apologists for the learned articles proving CO2 causes global warming, now ‘boiling’, he never receives them, not once.
Net zero is unattainable and pointless.
The news which exposes the futility of adjusting for climate boiling which does not exist came from Indonesia.
It would seem that their politicians are smarter than Australia’s.
Through a clever operation of banning exports until investment was attracted into the nickel industry and by using high-quality and cheap Australian coal to produce electricity for the extensive necessary processing, the Indonesians have effectively replaced our entire nickel industry.
The major reason for ours becoming un-economic is the Albanese-Bowen policy of burdening Australia with probably the Western world’s most expensive and unreliable electricity.
That buyers will pay a so-called ‘green premium’ for this the sort of infantile fiction pushed by Albanese and Bowen.
The reasons people buy goods or services are quality, efficient delivery and price.
When Australians realise that because of the elites’ agenda our GDP is falling towards a mere proportion of today’s, let us hope they do not seek salvation in some Juan Peron as the Argentinians did. While electing sound people rather than career politicians, let us hope they require fundamental reform to make our politicians accountable 24/7, just as they are in Switzerland.
As Ian Plimer jokes, the best politician is a frightened politician.
In the meantime, Leith Van Onselen points to a range of factors which explain Australia’s declining living standards and associated poor labour productivity.
Australia, he says, is unique in that it pays its way in the world primarily through the sale of its fixed mineral endowment.
A drover’s dog would realise that importing huge volumes of people through immigration distributes these mineral riches among more people, resulting in reduced wealth per person.
That is exactly what the Albanese government is now doing.
In fact Australia’s population has ‘ballooned’ by 8.1 million people (43 per cent) this century alone, with business investment, infrastructure investment, and housing and hospitals failing to keep pace.
Like so many New South Wales and Victorian state politicians, rather than standing up to Canberra, Premier Minns is acting as its lackey, planning to ruin Sydney by turning vast parts into canyons of high rise slums with hopelessly congested transport, roads, schools and hospitals.
Another factor is that the Reserve Bank, having kept interest rates very low, has significantly increased them in a highly concentrated mortgage market now more sensitive to such changes.
(There was a time when, with the presence of, for example, mutually owned building societies and government-owned banks, there was some protection against Reserve Bank variations.)
Leith Van Onselen argues that the biggest cost consequence of concentrated markets is in the energy market, especially on the east coast, which operates through a cartel which exports 80 per cent of the gas. There is little effective regulation over this and, unlike Western Australia, there is no domestic gas reservation policy requiring a certain amount of gas to be sold at fixed prices.
As we all know, we cannot depend on the much-vaunted so-called renewables, when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun is not shining. We need a backstop. And gas has the great advantage that it can be turned on very quickly.
So without a sensible reservation policy, when the international gas price goes up, Australians’ electricity prices go up and this is why we’re seeing such massive increases in household bills.
Among other factors for our declining living standards are the amount of bracket creep in personal income tax which is not indexed, as well as the increased excise on petrol and diesel.
This is notwithstanding the specially designed cosmetic change to taxation for the by-election, which involved the Prime Minister breaking innumerable promises.
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