Helmut Schmidt, former Chancellor of West Germany once observed that people who have visions should go and see a doctor.

Meanwhile, the Commonwealth Treasury has just released a document on Financial Innovation containing a section formally titled: Government’s vision.

Perhaps the necessary medication is covered under the PBS.

The Financial Innovation Strategy is eighteen pages of prose. It has principles. Three of them. And the very first principle, the bedrock, the foundation stone upon which the whole gleaming edifice rests, is:

Government leadership.

Not property rights. Not freedom of contract. Not the wild-eyed notion that a person might be trusted to decide what happens to their own money. No. Government leadership.

Savour the actual wording:

Government leadership sets the strategic direction and creates the enabling environment that brings together people, skills, capital and ideas, helping Australia attract investment, grow skilled jobs and scale financial innovation.

Values Based Chalmeris has now infected the bureaucracy.

But the bureaucratic logic, that capital is akin to a shy teenager at the school dance, hovering by the punch bowl, waiting for a Treasury official to take it gently by the elbow and introduce it to an idea.

As though millions of Australians making decisions about their savings every single day were an aimless crowd milling about a car park, longing for strategic direction from the Assistant Treasurer, the Hon. Daniel Mulino.

The comedy is that innovation is, almost by definition, the thing that happens when somebody ignores the strategic direction and the government’s central plan.

Nobody in history has ever invented anything because a committee established an enabling environment.

It is difficult to name a single transformative financial product that began life as a bullet point under a government plan.

Strip the branding and this document could have come from Gosplan.

The five-year plan for the sector. The coordinating committee. The confident assurance that the centre will identify priority areas and direct resources accordingly.

Perhaps a junior Treasury officer found an old Soviet document, hit find-and-replace on ‘tractor output’ and inserted ‘tokenised assets’.

Government setting the strategic direction guarantees precisely one outcome. The destination is poverty and penury, and the strategy will arrive on schedule.

First published on Substack. Read the original here…