Anthony Albanese is the Doc Brown of prime ministers because in less than two years he has invented a kind of time machine that has taken our wages back more than a decade to 2011 levels.
Last week, real wages finally increased for the first time during Anthony Albanese’s term. Real wages increased by the grand total of 0.1 per cent, which caused Mr Albanese to remark that “our plan for you to earn more and keep more of what you earn is working”.
Perhaps Mr Albanese has built his own spaceship too because he seems to have tweeted this from a different planet.
It is cold comfort for struggling Australians that, thanks to this 0.1 per cent increase, their standard of living has only fallen to the levels of September 2011 not June 2011.
There has been much talk this week about gender pay gaps. The government data released this week was useless to make any conclusions about this issue because it does not compare people working in the same jobs, or different experience levels, and it lumps together full time and part time workers.
The much bigger wage gap that we should talk about is the generational wage gap. Thanks to the runaway inflation that has put living standards back a decade, young Australians face the prospect of being poorer than their parents.
For our young people, it is not just the soaring price of groceries, electricity and petrol, it is also the almost impossible goal of home ownership. Last week a humble three bedroom terraced home in Sydney sold for the eye-watering figure of $9 million. Average house prices in Sydney are over $1 million and close to $800,000 in Melbourne and Brisbane.
To afford just an average home in our major cities you now need an income of almost $200,000, which puts you in the top tax bracket thanks to Anthony Albanese’s broken promise on taxes.
Rents have also increased by 30 per cent in Sydney and Melbourne, and 20 per cent in Brisbane.
Even as inflation recedes in coming years, higher mortgage payments and rents will mean that a real wage gap will open between our old and young. Until now, Australia has always offered a more prosperous and better life for the next generation.
However, the older Australians that are in charge of our country today are ripping up that social contract. Instead of more wealth and prosperity, our governments are promising a climate hairshirt in a futile attempt to save the planet.
Just over the last year our Green-Labor Government has introduced a carbon tax on our mines and factories, decided to make new petrol cars more expensive, discouraged the eating of red meat and announced plans to regulate what you can say on the internet. Our Government is on a warpath to tell us what car we can drive, what we can eat and even what we can say.
It makes one nostalgic for the then heated, but now seemingly quaint, debates about economic reform in the 1980s. At least then our governments were trying to make our lives easier by making our economy more productive.
The Anthony Albanese Government has no identifiable productivity agenda and without lifting our productivity we will not lift living standards for young Australians.
The solutions are not complex, they are simple, just not easy to do.
We need to build more cities to make first homes more affordable. We need to lower taxes and red tape to unlock the entrepreneurial spirit that our young people so clearly have in spades and we need to give up on our futile efforts to meet net zero emissions while the rest of the world emits at record levels.
But most of all we need to lower energy prices because the cost of energy flows through to the cost of almost everything. When I worked at the Productivity Commission, we estimated the impact of the 1980s economic reforms and we found that the biggest benefit came from the lowering of electricity prices between 1990 to 2005.
We can do that again if we build new power stations, including nuclear ones too.
In that respect, Mr Albanese is not the same as Doc Brown. Doc had no problem using plutonium to power Marty McFly’s DeLorean time machine. It is time to go Back to the Future and focus again on the economic reforms that will give young Australians a better life.
