Every time a left-leaning Treasurer comes into government and promises a ‘kinder version’ of capitalism, everything turns to shit. Rapidly.

We could say this is a version of Winston Churchill’s famous quote: ‘Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others…’ but the truth is simpler; the more socialism you add, the faster everything falls apart.

Socialism chews the fat off a nation. Healthier nations take longer to die, but they cark it eventually. We’re starting to see the bone poke through our skin.

While the Reserve Bank of Australia (somehow) didn’t pin the blame for the annual inflation figure of 3.8 per cent on government spending or its policies, most people have settled their angry gaze on the Treasurer.

In the past, Australia modelled itself on the tried-and-true equation of a hardworking private sector coupled with mining wealth and valuable exports. This provided enough loose change to run a bloated, parasitic bureaucracy where we penned-in the destructive academics and miserable communists.

In hindsight, we should have put them to work on the railroads.

That bureaucracy has gorged itself on the labour of the middle and working classes and bred like rabbits, overpopulating existing roles before spilling into the free market. Not satisfied with eating into the private sector, the public system has created new commissions, academic circles, arts industries, (monstrous) health entities, a grievance culture, and the culturally lethal activist machine that threatens the fabric of Australian society. The sheer size of this malignant entity is a terminal condition.

Taking Javier Milei’s chainsaw to wasted public sector money would fix the economy. This won’t happen. Grievance and laziness have become political white bread to Labor without which they’d starve.

And so it comes to pass that Jim Chalmers has presided over a mess he can no longer bury in the spreadsheets.

Today’s panicked headlines about inflation were written the moment Anthony Albanese’s team was re-elected.

‘I take responsibility for doing my job to address this inflation challenge in our economy,’ said the Treasurer. ‘To address the productivity challenge in our economy, and also to do what we can to make our economy more resilient in the face of all this global economic uncertainty.’

That’s a load of meaningless waffle.

‘In the data today, the timing of these payments combined with the ending of the state rebates at the same time is driving some of the temporary part of this inflation challenge.

‘We expected this because of a combination of those temporary factors and some of those persistent pressures, and so we still expect inflation to moderate over time.’

Hey, Jim… Why are ‘temporary’ payments coming to an end?

Is it because the government used handouts to disguise the rising cost of energy in the lead-up to an election after being embarrassed for breaking a previous election promise to lower energy prices?

When rates rise, homeowners will be the first on the list to go bust.

That’ll keep the radical socialists sitting on the fringes of Canberra happy, as they have been waging war on private property ownership for years. They took ‘own nothing and be happy’ very seriously … for you, not them. Most of the socialists in power enjoy multi-million-dollar property portfolios. This is not hypocrisy, because money taken from taxpayers is virtuous while money earned from scratch is evil capitalism. The only poor socialists are useful idiots. You’ll never meet a poor socialist in power, because they’re not idiots. They have turned leeching into an expression of moral purity.

Families, however, are dreading the next Reserve Bank Announcement following the Consumer Price Index rising 3.8 per cent in 12 months.

You have to remember, this is your fault for buying things at Christmas. If you listen to the ‘experts’, housing, food, (non-alcoholic) drinks, and your general recreational activities were big contributors to inflation. Never mind that Labor’s policy decision to import half a million people in a year pushed up total spending, even if individual Australians tightened their belt and spent less.

And of course, the government doesn’t want to talk about its outrageous spending spree on foreign countries, renewable energy, the NDIS, or even their own travel expenses and phone bills.

Did anyone else scoff at Jim Chalmers’ comments? He was directly questioned about the government’s addiction to spending taxpayer money.

‘No, I don’t think so… I don’t think it stands up against the evidence. If public spending was the problem, then we wouldn’t have seen three interest rate cuts last year and the big moderation that we saw in inflation.

‘Since we came to office, we got public spending down from around a third of the economy to closer to a quarter of the economy. We found $114 billion in savings, delivered two surpluses, got debt down by a couple of $100 billion as well.

‘And, so, if you look at our record on the budget, what you can see is we’ve been able to get the budget in substantially better nick than when we inherited it from our predecessors.

‘The story of the economy in the period covered by these inflation figures is a private sector story and not a public spending story.’

I have strong words that could be used here but instead let’s quietly point out that the reckless spending of the Morrison years were thanks to Covid, the NDIS, and Net Zero. All of these were policies supported and cheered on by Labor. There is no reason to believe our present economic position would be any different had Labor been in power. They don’t get to crayon-in their ‘economic credentials’ by pretending the 2018-ish years of excess spending came from nowhere.

And how do we know Labor would have been worse? Look at Victoria’s finances… There’s your hint.

There is something enormously sinister about an economic environment where Australians are punished for going out and spending money on holidays, food, and travel. How dare they create business for employment!

Worse, some of this is related to price increases, not consumption rates, which comes as a result of increased energy costs, rents, and labour. These are tightly linked to Labor’s policy decisions, not the market.

Everyone knows what happens when interest rates are pushed up. Businesses shut, families lose their homes, kids are pulled out of school, and farms shut down. For every business that is lost, dozens of jobs go with it which causes a repeat of the above. All of this leads to fewer consumers, less money for productivity, and a rapid collapse of domestic services. And for the first time in Australian history, this is happening while the government complicates the situation with a mixture of cashed-up foreigners (who out-bid Australians in homes and businesses) and humanitarian migrants (which come with a tax burden).

People feel like rats trapped in a box because that’s how the Labor government treats the Australian economy. The government doesn’t care about quality of life, it cares about the quantity of tax.

Australia could solve its inflation problem if someone ripped the Canberra chequebook away from Jim Chalmers. If we cut off all the payments to everything except essential services, we could get rid of our debt in a few years.

Government is responsible for inflation. They are the ones spending our future. They are the reason you might lose your house, your business, or your job.

It’s time voters start punishing governments at the polls instead of believing their excuses.

You didn’t do anything wrong by going on a small holiday. They did.

Flat White is written by Alexandra Marshall. If you would like to support her work, shout her a coffee over at donor-box.