As the union movement and other woke or left-wing entities struggle to find ever more imaginative new ways to waste the taxpayer’s hard-earned money, Marita Punshon writes in this week’s issue about the latest boondoggle from Tasmania. Certain council workers, she has discovered, will now get five days pay for only four days work. You little ripper! As Marita writes about this ‘bold’ and ‘progressive’ new policy, ‘The deal allows Launceston Council employees to work “30.4 ordinary hours over four days for 100 per cent of their current five-days salaries and receive a range of improved wage, allowance and leave entitlements”.’

This sort of disgusting profligacy should be the meat and potatoes of a federal opposition’s attack on the entire public sector economy, especially this week in light of the interest rate rise that bells the cat on Treasurer Jim Chalmers’ hopeless management of our economy. Once upon a time, any centre-right party worth its salt would have relished these sorts of wasteful and unjustifiable policies as examples of an entire economy lacking any serious management, from the silliest local council in Launceston to the mightiest corridors of Canberra. With the country burdened by a trillion dollars of debt, the idea that those on the public purse who already are cushioned from the worst impacts of Mr Chalmers’ policies are finding new ways to be less productive for more pay should make the rest of the community bristle with anger and outrage.

But, hey, what’s an extra day’s holiday a week amongst friends? In fact, why stop there? Why not have these valiant council workers work a three-day week, or even a two-day week, for their five-day pay?

It’s all just paper money after all in Jim’s brave new world of roaring inflation and a crashing economy.

The sad reality is that this country now has the worst treasurer in its history running one of the worst economies in the West. Inflation is up. Interest rates are up. Productivity continues to decline. New start-ups, new mines, new private businesses, innovations and new ideas are all stagnating under a veritable mountain of suffocating regulations, from the red tape of workplace rules to the green tape of environmental laws, to the black tape of indigenous restrictions and the blue tape of international obligations. We live in a country that is so economically illiterate, so reckless to our own future prosperity and so beholden to indigenous and environmental idiocy that we even blocked a gold mine because of a mystical serpent. A gold mine. To comprehend, let alone to contemplate, such stupidity is a feat beyond most normal citizens.

Meanwhile, the opposition is tearing itself apart after having been played a blinder by the Prime Minister with his superbly cynical response to the Bondi massacre. By wedging the Liberals and the Nationals over hate speech laws, Mr Albanese now sits back and chortles as the opposition flails around on the ground like Monty Python’s Black Knight.

It goes without saying that the Liberals should never have agreed to pass laws that give certain Australians the right to be jailed because other Australians react negatively to their words. It is a nonsense and, worse, it will exacerbate the very problem it was supposed to be addressing – the proliferation of radical Islam.

Whether it be the excessively high levels of immigration, the low productive quality of many immigrants, the insanity of the renewables ‘transition’, the rorting of the NDIS, selling off our precious defence assets, or any of the other areas in which this country is failing to live up to its potential, all roads lead inevitably back to the economy. ‘It’s the economy, stupid’ was of course Bill Clinton’s second-most famous line (‘I did not have sex with that woman’ being the first), and he was right. Only a treasurer with a clear understanding of economics and free markets would be capable of taming the worst excesses of this Labor government. Instead, we have a minister who cannot seemingly grasp even the most basic economic theories, going so far as to once boast that he was going to ‘re-invent capitalism’. And the more he attempts to do so, the worse things get.

In this week’s issue, Dimitri Burshtein and Peter Swan dissect in great deatail the manifest economic flaws of the Treasurer, labelling him, amusingly, ‘Dr Jim, the bracket creep’. We make no apology for the fact that it makes for rather depressing reading.

As this week’s cover suggests, perhaps we’d all be better off if Dr Chalmers took the Launceston approach – and switched not to a four-day week but to a four-hour week. The less time Dim Chalmers spends ‘managing’ our money the better for us all.