The second unusual thing Chalmers has done in the course of this term of government is to publish an essay outlining his economic vision. For those who keep it to hand (stop judging me), the essay is a very helpful guidebook to decode and anticipate the actions of the Albanese government.
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For instance, the recently announced Future Made in Australia policy, shaping up to be an election centrepiece, was foreshadowed when Chalmers invoked international alternative economics rock star Mariana Mazzucato in his think piece. Mazzucato claims that governments are behind major innovations and advocates for greater government involvement investing in and “collaborating” on future innovation.
So that’s just what the Albanese government is planning to do: invest and collaborate. And these investments will be “off-budget”, along with a slew of other funds the government is using to effectively hide spending, using a loophole, according to economist Chris Richards.
As a result, this coming budget won’t be troubled by the potential cost of the Future Made in Australia policy, which will make it a great 2025 election pitch. And it certainly won’t consider the potential investment risk. Research on venture capital investments in start-ups – which is essentially what this program envisages – finds that 75 per cent will “never return cash to investors” and 30 to 40 per cent fail and take investors’ money to the grave.
But back to the narrative, as Chalmers will deliver it on Tuesday night. As I mentioned, we’re getting to the part of the story where the treasurer reveals how the episodes we’ve seen to date come together. There’s no secret about this, because Chalmers has never hidden that he wants to be the Labor treasurer who steals the mantle of “better economic managers” from the Coalition – what in polling jargon is called the “electoral equity”. It burns him that voters perceive his political opponents as fundamentally better at this budgeting schtick than he is, and he’s determined that the public come to acknowledge him instead.
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So this is where it’s all going: a blank slate from the October budget, on which the treasurer can write a grand vision for the future without troubling the financial bottom line. Meanwhile, commodities do what they always have in Australia and give us great wealth, which we read as economic dynamism based on our hard work. Life is made sweeter by a slathering of government largesse in social spending, including childcare. (And just as we pretend the commodity cash comes from our hard work, we call spending on things like childcare an “investment” because more working women raises the national GDP. But we know it isn’t really an investment as such. If it were, it’d be off-budget, am I right?)
And then we all go off and decide whether it’s a good story and a true one, or at least one we want to believe.
Or, more likely, we forget the whole thing in our eagerness to find out if we were “winners” or “losers” on the night, and vote accordingly. At least, that’s what they’re banking on.
