Australia’s Treasurer, a man with a PhD in political science and the communicative precision of a fortune cookie, stepped to the microphone this week to inform the nation that the impact of the Middle East conflict on the Australian economy is ‘uncertain’ but ‘substantial’.

Read that again. Slowly.

Uncertain. But also substantial.

Jim Chalmers does not know what will happen, but he knows it will be big. He cannot tell you what it is, but he can tell you it is a lot.

The impact is a mystery wrapped in an enigma, garnished with a word salad, and Dr Jim Chalmers, PhD, wants you to know it is going to be absolutely enormous.

Probably. Maybe. Who can say, really.

This is horoscope writing with a ministerial salary attached:

Your economy faces uncertain but substantial disruption. Mercury is in retrograde and so is the budget.

Now to be fair, uncertainty is a legitimate economic concept. Economists use it constantly and with good reason. The future is genuinely hard to predict. Fine. Accepted. No argument here.

But here is the thing about uncertainty, and you would think the Treasurer of a significant nation have covered this somewhere around second year: uncertainty is supposed to constrain your claims, not coexist cheerfully alongside them.

If you are uncertain about the size of an impact, the correct thing to do is to offer a range, a scenario, a model, and a caveat-laden projection with some numbers attached. What you do not do is shrug theatrically about uncertainty and then confidently reach for ‘substantial’ like it is a free sausage at a Bunnings.

Uncertain but substantial is not a forecast. It is rhetorical porridge. Warm, beige, textureless, and ultimately nourishing no one.

But of course, we know exactly what this is. It is groundwork. It is pre-emptive alibi construction. It is a Treasurer quietly laying down tarpaulins before the ceiling caves in, so he can point at the tarpaulins later and say he had warned us about water.

Because let us state the obvious. Australia is going backwards. The budget is a calamitous mess. Australians are measurably poorer as a direct consequence of the actions and, just as importantly, the inactions of the Albanese government. Spending detonated. Taxes climbed. Regulation wound the Australian economy back toward an era that predates the colour television.

But it was not their fault, you see. Overseas factors. Global headwinds. The conflict. The uncertainty. The substantial uncertainty of the uncertain substantialness.

Chalmers and his colleagues did not drive the car into the ditch. The ditch was already uncertain. Substantially so.

This is, of course, entirely on-brand for a Treasurer who has elevated alliterative dreck to something approaching a governing philosophy. The man who gave us:

• Practical and pragmatic… progressive and patriotic
• Fraught and fragile
• Churn and change
• Considered and collaborative and ambitious
• Consultative, considered, methodical, responsible, mature

…has now added uncertain but substantial to his hall of fame.

The words always sound like they mean something. They never do. They are the verbal equivalent of elevator music. Jim Chalmers does not communicate in sentences. He communicates in the verbal equivalent of background noise.

The man is an economic Magic 8-Ball and yet the press gallery tells us Chalmers is one of the government’s best performers. One of the standouts. A safe pair of hands in a difficult time.

This assessment is only coherent if the government is performing a jelly wrestling opera, in which case, on reflection, the reviews do start to make sense.