Everyone knows it. I know it. You know it. Households know it. Business knows it. The IMF and OECD know it. And the Reserve Bank knows it.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers, despite being too busy with his turd-polishing and dizzy from all his spin, also knows it.

He simply has no intention of saying it.

The record speaks for itself. A per capita recession. Real household incomes that went backwards harder than almost anywhere in the developed world. No productivity, despite his fancy gabfest. Inflation above target for most of five years. Debt over $1 trillion. An IGR projecting deficits every year for at least the next 40 years.

And now an RBA cash rate about to hit a 15-year high of 4.6 per cent, with the high possibility of another before Christmas.

This is not bad luck. This is the results of government policy, the policies of a government in which Jimbo is a very senior member.

The government has responded to every one of these failures the same way.

Spend more. Hire more public servants. Hand out energy rebates to make the headline number look prettier. Subsidise a favoured business. Set up a funny money fund. Commission a review. Write an essay. Commission another review. Have a meeting. Host a round table. And, of course, spin and deflect.

Despite the theatre, the objective of this government is not the welfare of Australians. The objective is power: win the next election, reward the right constituencies and keep as many members of the parliamentary team as possible comfortably in charge.

Every announcement is a campaign stop. Every bad number is someone else’s fault.

This is not a bug in Team Albo’s strategy. It is the strategy.

And this week the government got some help from its friends.

RBA governor Michele Bullock told a CEDA audience that unemployment of 4.5 to 5 per cent would probably take enough heat out of the labour market to ease inflation. Unemployment is already 4.5 per cent. The RBA’s own forecast has it drifting to 4.8 per cent by mid-2028.

In response, the union movement reacted as if Bullock had ordered a Dan Andrews-style lockdown without a Josh Frydenberg-style fiscal piss-up.

The RBA is far from perfect. It cut rates too early in 2025, and its Goldilocks ‘narrow path’ was a scenic route to failure, so much so that Bullock has now quietly stopped using the phrase.

But the RBA did not start this fire. It has simply been left holding the extinguisher while the government keeps pouring petrol.

The Treasurer’s office, meanwhile, finally has some competition for the title of grand poo bah of planet economic dummkopf.

The union movement wheeled out the full catalogue. Greedy business. Supermarket gouging. Corporate profits. And from the Australian Services Union, a foreign war nobody voted for. Evidence? History? Bourgeois concerns.

The numbers present a problem for this narrative.

Non-tradable inflation, the homegrown kind that owes nothing to the Middle East, hit 4.4 per cent in July, up from 4 per cent a year earlier. Apparently the Iranian navy now sets the price of a haircut in Parramatta.

Missing from the union sermon is who inflation actually hurts. Not the rich, who own assets that rise with prices. It hurts the low paid and those on fixed incomes, including a great many union members.

The script is also suspiciously familiar. The same lines echo from the union movement and from its political wing, otherwise known as the Albanese government.

The unions are simply saying out loud what the government would prefer to say through intermediaries. It sounds less like analysis and more like a campaign.

My question is: Where are the modern-day Bill Keltys?

Kelty understood that real wages come from productivity, not from Canberra decree. He also knew that inflation is the enemy of the worker.

His successors would rather shout at the central bank than ask the government a single hard question. And why would they? The government and the unions want the same thing, and it is not a better deal for Australians. It is keeping the right people in the right jobs.

If Australians are busy fighting over the size of the pie slices, they won’t be fighting over the seats in parliament.

Things are looking so 1970s, I am waiting for the Albo and Jim to don their flares and big collars and grow out their mutton-chop sideburns.

First published on Substack. Read the original here…