Over the summer federal Treasurer Jim Chalmers took the time to write a 6000-word essay on his thoughts on the future of capitalism. I welcome the effort to explain the Government’s thinking on the economic challenges we face.
It is just too bad that the Treasurer’s thinking is not focused on the day-to-day challenges of average Australians.
The most bizarre thing about the Treasurer’s essay is what it does not say.
There is no mention of the word “family”, despite Australian families facing the worst cost-of-living crisis in a generation.
There is no mention of the words “agriculture” or “mining”, despite these sectors holding up the Treasurer’s budget as we benefit from a commodity price boom.
And, there is no mention of “small business”, despite the crippling staff shortages they face and the endless red tape they must navigate.
There are eight mentions of the word “bank”, however, and that seems to be the Treasurer’s focus.
The one new policy idea in the Treasurer’s essay is his promise to this year “create a new sustainable finance architecture, including a new taxonomy to label the climate impact of different investments”.
Over summer I sat down with my wife to do our budget for the year. We had to increase the amounts we spend on food, petrol and mortgage repayments. It did not strike me that the one thing I needed was a “new taxonomy” to help me make climate investments.
Why is the Treasurer so out of touch with the needs of the average family? Unfortunately, Jim seems to be spending more time around the boardroom tables of the big banks in Melbourne than he is around the kitchen tables of Marsden in his own electorate in Logan.
The banks are desperate for a “new taxonomy” to make climate investments. They see a river of fees and bonuses flowing from the creation of useless green investments. That is why the banking sector is melting down over the opposition from the LNP, and the Greens, to the Government’s new carbon tax, known as the Safeguard Mechanism.
That tax would create an alphabet soup of new carbon credits, ACCUs, SCUs and the like, that Labor would make businesses buy. While the banks stand to grow their already record profits by trading in these products, the rest of us would be forced to pay more for basic essentials as the costs are passed on.
So while the Treasurer is casting himself as a reincarnated John Maynard Keynes, he is really more Sam Bankman-Fried – the disgraced founder of the cryptocurrency firm FTX. If you think crypto has been a scam wait to hear about carbon credits.
Australian National University professor Andrew Macintosh claims 80 per cent of carbon credits are flawed, and that people are getting credits for not clearing forests that were never going to be cleared and for growing trees that are already there.
In Spain, renewable energy credits have been generated by producing solar power at night through the innovative use of large spotlights and diesel generators. In India, the purchase of a new fridge has generated carbon credits even when the old fridge just gets sold on the second hand market.
And even the Mafia have got in on the game. The Daily Star in the UK recently reported that “despite the arrest of Mafia boss Matteo Messina Denaro, 60, this week, the battle against Cosa Nostra is not over because it is earning billions of euros each year creating solar and wind farms.” It turns out carbon credits are an easy way to launder money.
The Treasurer explained his essay as the way to help recover capitalism from a series of crises. It is more likely that his proposals simply created another financial crisis that regularly affects the banking sector.
Nonetheless, the Treasurer has done us a great service by putting pen to paper and revealing how disconnected he is from the pressures facing Australian families.
On first reading his essay I dubbed him the “Messiah from Marsden” but, on reflection, his writing appears to be from another planet. So a more apt byline would be written by the Messiah from Mars.
