The lies about productivity, regulation, multiculturalism, debt, and carbon dioxide are coming home to roost in Australia. By Paul Kelly in The Australian.
Don’t think the seventh intergenerational report (IGR) released this week by a confident Treasurer, Jim Chalmers, is about dry technical economics. This document is a political time bomb because it reveals the scale of Australia’s long-run redirection under Labor and signals that the 2028 election will be one of the most polarising and ideological contests in our history. …
What is the Labor plan? It is a double-down on the current Albanese government agenda. If you thought our existing tribulations might provoke a Labor rethink, you could not be more misconceived. Labor’s current policies will be entrenched as the Australian model for future decades, adapting them to a changing world.
While most economic indicators are predicted to improve, the big picture is enshrined over the coming 40 years:
- slower economic growth
- permanent budget deficits
- higher government spending
- higher personal income tax
- more emphasis on renewables and net zero
- strong immigration
- falling fertility rates
- an industrial base shaped by services, clean energy
- AI as a revolutionary technology that delivers a dynamic economy and an eruption in productivity that means enhanced living standards.
Labor believes it has correctly diagnosed the times.
What do right wingers say?
Yet the three parties of the right wing — Liberal, National and One Nation — are embracing a radical agenda that at every major decision point rejects the Labor/Treasury/IGR vision and, indeed, views much of the document as an alarming prophecy of national decline and hardship.
Former treasurer Costello told Inquirer: “The IGR was designed to give a measure of how fairly current generations were treating future generations. When you compare the situation today and the situation in 2002, we are in a far worse position. We have had no increase in real wages for about a decade, our living standards are falling, our productivity is zero, we’ve got demand-driven programs that guarantee higher costs in the future, and the Albanese government produces a report to say how well we are doing.
“This is complacency writ large. The whole idea of the IGR was a call to arms, but this is a laying down of arms. Here’s the critical point. Rather than come up with a plan off the back of this IGR to do something about our economic decline, the essence of this IGR is to assume the problem away. …
“To put the future of the Australian economy into the AI basket is like embracing a cargo cult.”
Labor believes all the lies of the left, and will govern as if they are true.