I had a win of sorts last weekend. I won our local tipping contest on the outcome of the federal election. I had strategically left my entry until as late as possible and thought I was being equally canny by going for an outer-bound entry – Labor 80 seats, majority win. As it turned out, 80 was too low but it was the highest among our little band of intrepid punters. My prize was simply the glory, or possibly something else.

Like many Speccie readers, I always have some micro-objectives on these occasions. You know the sort of thing – a particular person in a particular seat to lose. On this score, I was bitterly disappointed, with my small hopes and prayers basically going up in a puff of smoke. I was very keen for Monique to be able to spend more time with her husband, but sadly this objective looks as though it was dashed by the good burghers of Kooyong.

As for my dream that the Greens would do badly, it wasn’t such a bad night. Their overall share of the vote fell very slightly. Two seats in Queensland have been lost.  Adam Ant has struggled to retain the seat of Melbourne. With Labor’s thumping majority in the House and probably more senators to boot, the influence of the Greens is likely to fall away considerably over the next three years. Oh, shucks.

Even so, it’s desperate times and my immediate reaction is to retreat into the garden and eat some worms. Alternatively, I can pull up my socks and decide that making the case for sound economic policy is possibly more important than ever. So that’s the fork in the road I am taking. Besides, worms sound so unappetising.

In his address to the National Press Club during the last week of the election campaign, Anthony Albanese bizarrely claimed to be an economist. He did this while mistaking the recent fall in inflation to be the best outcome in two decades: in point of fact, it was the best outcome in three years.

Now you might think that we all make mistakes, a slip of the tongue here or there.  But this error was much more significant than that. It completely overlooked the two decades during which we experienced very low inflation, lower than the annual target of 2 to 3 per cent.

That was the challenge.  Unacceptably high inflation became a problem after excessive Covid-related spending and disrupted international supply chains – after 2021.

The only conclusion to reach is that Albo doesn’t have the faintest clue of what has gone on in the economy while he has been in parliament. It’s not even clear that he cares.

But to suddenly describe himself as an economist, give me a break. He squeezes a wildly misleading and content-free three-year political economy degree into four or five years. The material offered up was from red Ted Wheelwright and the socialist Frank Stillwell, the key figures in the political economy movement at Sydney University. Let’s get real, this background does not form the basis for anyone calling themselves an economist.

But bear in mind here, the term economist is not a legally reserved title. There are no legal remedies against someone wrongly calling themselves an economist. This is in sharp contrast with many regulated professions such as architects, psychologists and medical practitioners.

At one stage, a group of rather stuck-up economists had lengthy discussions about methods of limiting people calling themselves economists. Minimum educational qualifications, membership of the Economic Society and other possible prerequisites were considered.

In the end, it was decided that occupational regulation was inconsistent with the belief of most economists in free markets. The users of the services of so-called economists can figure out whether the title is deserved. Of course, Albo is not a person who believes in free markets so there is a degree of irony there.

So, what do the next three years hold with our ‘economist’ at the helm who strongly believes that he understands good economic policy even though he wouldn’t recognise it if it hit him in the face?

Where once the proportion of GDP that was made up of federal government spending hovered around the 22 to 24 per cent, we are now looking at around 27 per cent and higher. It won’t be long before annual federal government outlays will top one trillion dollars. These are days of BIG GOVERNMENT. Whitlam’s efforts look modest in comparison.

In Albo the economist’s world, there are no perverse incentives, no opportunity costs (the cost of doing one thing is the cost of not being able to do another), governments don’t crowd out private investment and government benefits should be available to everyone, rich and poor.

He doesn’t see it as a problem racking up government debt at what some people would see as an alarming rate. Peter Costello left office in 2007 having managed to pay off all federal government debt. Two decades later and government debt will have reached over one trillion dollars.

The rate of increase in our government debt is close to a record among advanced economies but it’s not clear just what we have to show for it. But Albo has more plans.  He has hinted several times that his legacy will be universal childcare in which everyone, poor and rich, can plonk their preschool kid in a unionised centre for a flat daily fee – say $10 per day. His feminist mates are very keen on this idea, and he is planning on delivering.

The fact that even the Productivity Commission concluded that universal childcare along these lines is not a good economic idea won’t deter him. And the figures are truly staggering, although for Albo they may be only numbers. The taxpayer is currently forking out more than $14 billion each year in childcare fee subsidies – the top up of the wages of childcare workers is additional to that figure.

The likely underestimate of the Productivity Commission of the additional cost of moving to the flat fee universal version is over $8 billion per year.  But here’s the kicker point made by the PC: ‘a disproportionate share of the increased government support would go to the families whose incomes are in the top 25 per cent of the income distribution.’

That’s right, in Albo the economist’s bizarro world, the taxpayer should be paying out big – nay, ginormous – bucks each year to allow the well-heeled mums and dads of Kooyong to plonk young William and Phoebe in childcare for a minimum of three days per week at a mere $10 a day. What a bargain.