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.

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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.

However, for the millionth time. The WA GST “deal” is just and appropriate. This despite the caterwauling of the central planner commentariat led by Ken Henry and Saul Eslake.

Estlake’s criticisms are particularly offensive given he is a wealthy Tasmanian resident and a direct beneficiary of the socialist horizontal fiscal equalisation system that steals money from WA to give to TAS.

Let’s make it abundantly clear. Horizontal Fiscal Equalisation, the system that pools GST revenue to be dolled out by the Commonwealth based on “need” is textbook Communism. Karl Marx could not have designed a better system.

From each state according to its capacity to each state according to its need.

It should be dismantled, but if it is to remain, then it is unjust that Western Australians be stolen from.

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There have been others who have said this, but I will just highlight the words of James Massola from, where else but, the SMH:

… Anthony Albanese promised his government would never alter the outrageously generous GST deal that hands extra cash to Australia’s richest state.

This of course is complete and utter BS, which is of course perpetuated by the Canberra Central Planning Elite.

There is no extra cash handed to “Australia’s richest state”. It is that Western Australians are allowed to keep more of their tax money.

This is the same perverse logic that tax increases are a saving and tax cuts are a cost to the budget. The premise, false at that, is that the state owns 100% and what citizens are allowed to keep is the generosity of the government.

Stop it. Just stop it.

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WA is not being subsidised. Tasmania, ACT, NT, Victoria and SA are just being subsidised a bit less.

The real losers in this are the tax payers of NSW and Queensland.

If Tasmania wants more revenue, it should fix its economy and stop leeching off the rest of Australia.

How did you go broke?

Argentina replies to Australia:

Gradually and then suddenly.

But why do you ask?

Australia replies:

Just making sure we are getting close.

So how will Australia do it, go broke that is .…

Government spending and increased regulation pushes inflation up. Inflation forces the RBA to push interest rates up.

Then Government changes tax policy with the result that the marginal buyer is removed.

The combined result, property prices fall, not because the market broken, but because policy worked exactly as designed.

But most property is bought with debt, and because bank capital requirements are a function of risk models, with declining asset values against the loans written, the bank risk departments and APRA get edgy.

Rising arrears raise probability of default. Risk weighted assets go up, and APRA, doing precisely its required job tells the banks to hold more capital against the same loan book.

Lower return on the same lending. Banks do not eat that. They cannot, because their shareholders are the super funds holding your retirement. So they widen their lending margins and raise interest rates on loans independent of an RBA increase.

The out of cycle rate rise is the part that actually does the damage. The RBA does not have to move at all. The banks reprice on their own, and the message landing in every household is: it is worse than they are telling you.

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Consumption stops. Retail rolls over. Hiring stops. Unemployment ticks up, which feeds more loan arrears, which feeds the models, which feeds the capital requirement. The loop is now self propelling and requires no further assistance from anyone.

Enter the government, cape already on.

This is the part I am most confident about, because we have the receipts.

Wayne Swan still believes the 2008-09 cash splash saved Australia. It did not; China’s stimulus, an iron ore price going vertical and a banking system that was never permitted to write subprime did most of the lifting. But Swanny believes, deep down in his bones, that he and the Rudd Government were the saviours.

Jim Chalmers was his adviser at the time so lo and behold he believes it too. Anthony Albanese and a fair slab of the current cabinet sat around the Rudd cabinet table watching it happen drew the same lesson, which was the wrong one.

This government is not populated by a group of people who respond to a housing downturn with restraint. That is a group of people with a flattering story about themselves in which more government spending is the thing that works. The only thing that works.

So it arrives: support for construction, support for buyers, support for the states, funded by borrowing or tax or both, which is inflationary, which puts more pressure on the RBA. Fiscal foot on the accelerator, monetary foot on the brake, everybody very pleased with their own footwork.

Then the bit nobody has priced. A large and growing share of the lending here is not on a bank balance sheet at all. It is private credit, and a great deal of it sits inside super: SMSFs reaching for yield, retail funds, industry funds. Most of that book is financing property development.

This lending is not stress tested by APRA, it is marked infrequently, it is sold on a yield number, and it is held by people who have never watched it behave in a downturn.

When margins compress and pre sales stall, that credit does not reprice gracefully, it simply stops. Facilities are not written, existing ones are not rolled, and developers discover that solvency and liquidity are different words.

Housing construction falls off a cliff at the exact moment the shortage is the central political issue, and the losses land in super accounts that voters check on their phones.

Cue the government comes in wearing its cape again, bigger this time, funded the same way, with the same result.

You can run this loop as often as you like. There is a country that ran it for seventy years. Every intervention was reasonable on its own terms and a response to the last one. Nobody ever chose the outcome.

Not long after, Canberra will be renamed Buenos Aires and Spanish becomes the main language taught in Australian schools.

Gradually. Then suddenly.

Cash is king and its hard to mask the accounting BS tricks of overpaid boffins.

There is no cash or accrual or operating budget obfuscation. It just shows the debt outstanding. So ta da:

Yes. The number officially ticked over $1 trio last week before coming back. But now it is over $1 trio for good. I cannot see it getting under this number in my lifetime.

As Milton Friedman said:

Keep your eye on how much the government is spending, because that is the true tax.

And Australians have never been taxed more. Even before state and territory insanity is counted.

The timing is perfect with global bond yields increasing so get ready for ever more of your tax dollars to go towards debt servicing to meet the cost of prior waste.

Depressing? Yes it is.

there can be only one

It is a moment of pure triumph. One man. One victory. No ambiguity.

When Australia’s gross federal debt crossed one trillion dollars for the first time in the nation’s history on 20 August 2026, there was only one person, holding the sword of profligacy, standing over the carcass of fiscal responsibility. And that man was James Edward Chalmers PhD, self-styled architect of responsible economic management, the Highlander of Hillcrest, the values-based capitalist, the Trillion Dollar Man.

If you are foolish enough to believe Treasury forecasts, the May budget projects gross debt at $1.25 trillion by 2029-30. The annual interest bill last year was $27.6 billion and is forecasted to reach $46.9 billion by the end of the decade. That is roughly $90,000 every single minute of every single day. And rising.

That is before the debt of the states and territories is counted. The Parliamentary Budget Office expects state and territory debt to reach $770.9 billion by 2029-30, with Victoria alone at $244.9 billion. This additional burden accumulates behind the federal figure like mould behind the bathroom tiles.

Combined, Australian governments are on track for

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Saul Eslake was evidently unavailable. Chris Richardson must have been washing his hair.

So out comes Ken Henry from his wombat hole, wearing his “Central Planning and Socialism Can Work, Ask Me How” t-shirt, arms in the air, yelling look at me, look at me.

His latest contribution, in 4 paragraphs reported in the Australian:

Former Treasury boss Ken Henry says the current GST carve-up which favours Western Australia is “stupid”, disavowing WA Premier Roger Cook’s attacks on the Productivity Commission for recommending the Commonwealth ditch the deal.

Calling on the federal government to stand up to “bullying and intimidation from Western Australian premiers”, Dr Henry claimed the current GST carve-up had undermined Australia’s system of horizontal fiscal equalisation.

“If the wealthiest state in the nation, can come to Canberra with a begging bowl and get the rest of the country to put money into that begging bowl … if that’s how this system is going to work then this system is going to fail,” he told Radio National.

“One day the system is going to break and without a high-integrity system of fiscal equalisation, the Australian federation is going to face some pretty serious challenges.”

Well Ken Ken the Windbag Man, if you feel this strongly, from the comfort of a publicly funded and taxpayer guaranteed defined benefit pension, that the Commonwealth Government simply must do something, then nominate.

Put your name on a ballot paper and face on a corflute, and go win the argument in front of people who are allowed to sack you. We can guess the colour you will be running on.

But no. Much easier to pontificate and we get the retired mandarin’s venue of choice, the publicly funded and guaranteed ABC, where the chairs are soft, the questions are softer, and nobody ever asks the guest who built the machine he is now complaining about.

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Henry offers an ominous warning.

One day the system is going to break, he says, and without a high-integrity system of fiscal equalisation, the Australian federation is going to face some pretty serious challenges.

Sparty’s view. Good. Even great. Fricken great.

Break it. Break it up and sell the pieces for scrap.

Because let us say plainly what horizontal fiscal equalisation actually is - from each state according to its capacity, to each state according to its need.

That is not clever federal plumbing. This is textbook Marxian socialism which has been running as national policy for decades while pretending the Commonwealth Grants Commission’s modelling turns it into something respectable.

It does not. It is central planning with footnotes and a relativity table.

Of course Henry defends it. Beyond handing Canberra a permanent lever to ride roughshod over the states, he helped pour the foundations.

He was in the engine room for the Howard and Costello GST architecture and the distribution formula bolted onto it, the one that turned Australian federalism into a permanent audition for sympathy.

The incentives worked exactly as designed. Tasmania, the ACT, the Northern Territory, South Australia and now Victoria worked out long ago that the reliable route to GST revenue share is not building an economy, it is cultivating a grievance.

Why approve a mine, or a gas field, or anything that generates actual taxable activity, when having a feeble fiscal capacity is the very thing that gets you paid?

That is what Henry calls high-integrity. A system that rewards mendicancy and fines the states doing the digging, the shipping and the earning.

And here is the bit the mendicant choral singers will never say out loud, because saying it ruins the act.

WA is not asking anyone to subsidise it. It subsidises the rest of you and all it has asked is to subsidise you slightly less.

That is the outrage, apparently.

So perhaps Ken Ken the Windbag Man, take your begging bowl and put it over your head. Better yet. Over your mouth.

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It is absolutely definitely not the case that everyone who writes for the SMH is an idiot, it has some good writers. But more likely than not, if you are an idiot, you will likely get a run in the SMH.

The SMH has lots of good and smart writers, but there are also Ross Gittins, Millie Muroi, Jacqueline Maley, Waleed Aly, Peter FitzSimons, Niki Savva.

The cream of the crap floating atop what was once a great masthead.

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Exhibit D this week: Following its mostly ridiculous coverage of the Scots College Boys allegations, the SMH Education Editor runs:

The Sydney private school boards that have the gender mix right, and all the ones that don’t.

Three boys have been charged with a serious crime. The Herald responded with a spreadsheet.

Not a spreadsheet of what the school did or failed to do. A spreadsheet of the gender composition of private school boards, ranked, with a governance consultant brought in to observe that it is “hard to see how a council dominated by one gender can effectively guide the school’s executive” on consent.

Not a word about what those directors know. Whether they can read, let alone read a set of accounts. Whether they have ever run anything. Governance, finance, curriculum, risk, their values, their temperament. All irrelevant!

Forget education experience, governance experience, management experience, political perspective, perhaps even some cognitive or experiential diversity.

There must be a 50/50 male-female split, and only once there is gender equivalence, the alleyways of Bondi Junction will be forever safe.

I am mildly surprised they stopped at gender. No column on the sexual preference of school councillors? Perhaps for the next column.

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But while we are counting, what is the gender balance of the average public school board? Hmm.

Perhaps because there is none. Public schools take their directions from the Macquarie Street politburo and not from a board. Homogenised, standardised, and industrialised regardless of local conditions.

As always, the gender balance metric only gets applied where the answer is useful, and it is useful here because the destination is the abolition of the independent school sector and the delivery of every child to the same government department staffed by the teachers encouraging kids to skip school and attend public protests.

Meanwhile, a gender balance metric is also, awkwardly, available closer to home.

The Herald’s parent company, Nine Entertainment, publishes details of its own board and management team. The board runs to six directors: four men, two women. Two-thirds, one-third.

The management team runs to nine: six men, three women. Two-thirds, one-third again.

If a 67/33 split makes it hard to see how a school council can guide an executive on consent, one wonders what it does to a media company’s capacity to guide a newsroom on anything at all.

Send in the compliance officers. Report it to the Workplace Gender Equality Agency. ASX Corporate Governance Council. Commission the lawyers and consultants.

Yet from the masthead that ranked every private school in Sydney by gender ratio, on the gender ratio of the company that owns it, silence. How could that be?

The numbers are on Nine’s own website. The education editor did not even need to leave the building.

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Then there is Peter FitzSimons, whose column on Saturday allowed that elite school sports culture has much to answer for after a week like this one while taking care to add that it can still be a force for good.

What the reader is nowhere told is that the author is himself a product of the same system.

FitzSimons went to Knox Grammar, played in the 1st XV, and turned that into Sydney University, Manly, five years of professional rugby in France, seven Tests for the Wallabies, and a four-decade career writing about it.

A column arguing that elite schoolboy rugby manufactures entitled young men, written by a man whose public life was manufactured by elite schoolboy rugby, might ordinarily carry a line of disclosure.

In contrast, one of the smartest humans ever to walk this earth, Thomas Sowell, once upon a time, wrote a book titled A Conflict of Visions. In it, Sowell argued that most political disagreements are downstream of a prior disagreement about human nature.

The unconstrained vision holds that people are fundamentally good and improvable, and that when they behave badly it is because something did it to them. Bad institutions. Bad conditioning. Bad culture.

Since the fault sits in the arrangements, the fix is to tear down the institutions, redesign the arrangements, and the redesigning is done by the virtuous few, with the correct mindset and the requisite moral clarity.

The constrained or tragic vision, in contrast, holds that human beings arrive with appetites, self-interest and a limited capacity for restraint, and that this does not change.

Civilisation is not the natural state. It is a thin veneer of habits, incentives, sanctions and supervision laid over something that is always there.

Under the constrained vision, we are only a generation away from barbarism.

In this world, there are no solutions, only trade-offs. The civilisation has to be repeated and handed down from generation to generation.

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Most of the columns written about Scots have come from the first, unconstrained, vision.

The boys were fine, the school corrupted them; the boys were fine, the social media algorithm corrupted them; the boys were fine, the board’s gender ratio corrupted them.

The prescriptions follow axiomatically. More consent education. Regulated social media feeds. Gender quotas. No independent schools. And of course, more government to re-educate people and taxes to pay the re-educators.

The awkward fact sits in the reporting itself. Consent education has been mandatory nationally since 2023, and Scots says it has taught consent and respectful relationships from kindergarten to senior school for at least fifteen years. The unconstrained answer to a failed program is always the same program, delivered harder, by better people. And gender quotas.

The tragic vision starts somewhere less flattering.

Boys do not arrive at kindergarten as angels awaiting corruption. They arrive as humans, unfinished, with poor judgment and strong impulses, and the entire job of a school, a family, and a community is to build the restraints before the impulses find an opportunity.

Restraint is taught by fathers who model it, by leaders who do not make inappropriate melon gags, by consequences that are certain rather than eloquent, by supervision, by shame, by institutions, and by the plain knowledge that actions have consequences and that humans have agency.

This is unfortunately the harder and more demanding position, not the softer one.

If culture did it, no one in particular did it.

If the algorithm did it, the accused are victims too, and the sentence should reflect that.

Systemic excuses are an alibi machine, and it issues alibis to everyone within reach.

The tragic vision issues no alibis. Three individuals are charged. The courts will determine what happened, and if the allegations are proven, what they did is a serious crime, and they will answer for it as individuals.

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No board gender balance explains it, mitigates it, or would have prevented it. No change of headmaster will prevent the next one.

That is precisely why the tragic vision gets no run in the Herald. It leaves nothing for the celestially anointed to redesign the system or a culture to blame. Or a mirror for the parents to look into.

Raising a boy to a man who will not do what is alleged to have been done takes at least eighteen years, and it is done by people whose names do not appear on a list of school directors.

But showing that excess bran can cause a loose stool …

Bran Black, BCA CEO, intends to say this:

too much of our nation’s economic discourse occurs between governments, business groups, unions, economists and commentators

All while:

the BCA has joined forces with thirty leading national organisations under the banner of the Alliance of Industry Associations

So the diagnosis is that public policy discourse is a closed shop, and the prescription it to reduce the numbers of tickets to the closed shop. The cure for a closed loop is a bigger loop with letterhead and a media contact.

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And this is why the contradiction does not embarrass Bran’s Flakes. You only worry about the discourse being a closed shop if your goal is to change something.

If your goal is a seat at the table, a closed shop is the entire business model.

Thirty one members, one table, and a Prime Minister within handshake distance.

Not a business council. Bran’s Canape Association was right the first time, with a policy department attached.

Gaffe 1: the Prime Minister of Australia sat down with a comedian in character as “Bush Barbie” and played shag, marry, kill, answering “Kylie, clearly, all of the above.”

Gaffe 2: the melons. Two crown melons, gifted by Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, discussed on camera with a hand gesture in the general vicinity of his own chest. Albanese maintains the gesture was purely horticultural. Of course it was, mate. Of course it was.

Gaffe 3: the one that sailed past almost everybody, and the only one that menaces the sovereignty of a neighbouring democracy. Whiskey glass topped up, Australia’s Prime Minister looked down the barrel and said Australia could take over New Zealand, that it is still in the Constitution, and that we can just do it.

I can only imagine the chortles in the caucus room as the Prime Minister, in Putin like fashion, floats “absorbing” a neighbour.

Allow me to lodge a formal submission with the Prime Minister’s office. Absolutely not. Flock no thanks.

Not because it would be wrong. Because it would be a colossal waste of money. Correction. Another colossal waste of your money.

Tasmania is our allocated island of scenic mendicancy, and the allocation is full.

There is no room in the federal budget for a second Tasmania, particularly one that arrives with its own airline, its own grievance about the 2015 Rugby World Cup, and roughly five sheep per human being.

Do you know what happens when four and a half million people bring twenty five million dependants to a GST carve up?

Then consider what the Australian Taxation Office does on contact with the New Zealand economy.

That economy is currently held together by dairy exports, tourism, and film rebates for movies about a small man walking somewhere. Point the ATO at it and the whole thing goes to hell in a handbasket inside a fortnight. Bracket creep alone would empty the South Island.

And here is the detail nobody in Canberra has thought about, because thinking is not what Canberra is for. New Zealand has no comprehensive capital gains tax. None. An entire nation of untaxed upside, sitting there like an unattended esky.

Capitalism without Australian characteristics.

Now imagine Jim Chalmers, our philosopher king of values based socialism, being handed the keys to it. This is a Treasurer who already worked out how to tax gains that have not happened yet.

Within one budget cycle every farm, bach and Auckland villa across the dutch gets revalued, reframed, and quietly relieved of whatever value it was rude enough to accumulate.

Whatever little New Zealand still produces would be confiscated in the name of shared prosperity.

If you want to know how integrating a poorer neighbour works out, ask Germany.

Thirty five years on, Germans are still paying for reunification. They rebuilt the east brick by brick, funded it with a solidarity surcharge that outlasted several governments, and threw in decades of transfers on top.

And as a bonus, the package came with a quiet physicist from Brandenburg who went on to run the place for sixteen years.

The bill for Mutti Merkel’s tenure is not just German either. Ask anyone in Europe about the energy grid, the pipeline, or the 2015 border decision, and watch the eye twitch.

That invoice is still being paid, and it will keep arriving long after everyone who signed for it has retired to write a memoir.

So ask yourself what comes like a set of steak knifes with a New Zealand order.

Jacinda Ardern.

A Prime Minister who became a global brand, governed by kindness, told her citizens her government was the single source of truth, sealed the border like a Tupperware lid, and then walked off the job because there was nothing left in the tank.

She took the memoir, the Harvard fellowship and the documentary. New Zealand got the recession and a generation of graduates queueing at Sydney Airport.

So no, Albo. Put the whiskey down.

Shag, marry, kill is a party game, not a foreign policy. And when the item on the board is New Zealand, the correct answer is none of the above.

You built a better machine. You ran more units through the same factory. You put the thing in a steel box that slotted onto a truck, then a ship, then a train, and stopped paying forty blokes to hand-carry it up a gangplank. The cost of production fell, prices followed, and living standards rose without anybody needing to issue a media announcement about it.

The Albanese government has since discovered a shortcut. Why endure the tedium of productivity growth when you can

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It seems that Democratic Socialists of America are now running Labor’s playbook line for line. And when actual card-carrying socialists start plagiarising your economic program, it is worth asking what that says about the politicis of the original authors.

You may remember my recent post about Australia turning into Argentina, the one Spectator Flat White kindly re-ran.

The Australian Government makes electricity expensive and unreliable. The businesses that run on electricity begin to fall over. Government then flies in with multiple billions of dollars to save them from the policy government wrote, wearing the expression of a man pulling a child from a river he personally pushed them into.

The Canberra Policy Circle Jerk. CPCJ. Trademark pending.

Now to New York, where Mayor Zohran Mamdani is proving stupidity is not a national trait but an export product.

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Five government-owned grocery stores, US$70 million to build them, staple products at thirty percent below market (as if they know what is a market!)

No rent. No property tax. No profit motive, which is fortunate, because on those numbers there will not be one.

And since free land still does not get you to minus thirty, the city has asked operators to nominate how much extra cash they will need on top.

The term of art is “affordability payment.” We can call it other people’s money with a bow on it.

Grocery retail runs on margins of 1 to 4 percent. Being undercut by 30 percent is not competition, it is a demolition order in a friendly font.

Then someone asked the obvious question - what about the existing grocery stores?

To wit, the official running the CPCJ program said the New York City governemnt will hand out grants to the grocers afraid of being wiped out.

Taxpayer money to destroy the business. Taxpayer money to compensate the business for being destroyed. Two appropriations, two sets of guidelines, two evaluation frameworks, and one net outcome of fewer grocers and more people employed to think about grocers.

This is Tomago with better bagels.

Nobody wins here except the bureaucrats, and the government that ends up choosing which private operators survive on its drip feed.

That is not a grocery policy. It is the acquisition of the means of production, fully costed and stakeholder engaged.

The arsonists have arrived with a hose and a media pack. This time they brought grant forms.

it’s a pity both sides can’t lose.

That is exactly the sentiment I feel reading about Pauline Hanson taking her section 18C case to the High Court, after being found to have broken federal law by telling Mehreen Faruqi to go back to Pakistan.

This is not about Hanson. I would not have said what she said, but I think the finding against her was ridiculous, and I wholly support her right to say it. I hope she wins.

18C is an abomination. Repeal it, salt it, bury it.

But I am every bit as angry about the means by which she is challenging it. The implied freedom of political communication was created out of whole cloth by the High Court, and is every bit as rotten as the law it is now being used to attack.

Understand what the implied freedom actually is.

It is not in the Constitution. You may read the document front to back and back to front, and you will not find it.

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It was magically located in 1992 by a High Court that went looking behind the text and, to nobody’s great surprise, found what it went looking for.

It was conjured.

Then, in the finest tradition of the judiciary, the court built a multi step balancing test around it, so that only judges can say when it applies.

If Barton, Deakin, Griffith and the rest had wanted a free speech guarantee, they knew exactly how to write one. The Americans managed to put it in their bill of rights. And every Commonwealth parliament in the one hundred and twenty five years since has had the chance to legislate a proper protection.

Instead we got 18C, defamation laws that make London look permissive, and a national anti bullying policy for adults. Oh, and ACMA and the eSafety Commissioner.

Please do not read this as an argument against free speech. It is the opposite. I want free speech so badly that I refuse to accept this counterfeit version of it.

A freedom that exists because seven people divined it from the metaphysics of the Constitution can be undivined by seven different people.

Rights found in penumbras can be lost in penumbras. There is no ratchet. There is only the composition of the bench and the mood it is in.

So put it in the Constitution. In English. Unambiguous, entrenched, referendum tested, in a section with a number you can cite without a footnote explaining which balancing test currently applies.

Until then we are all Hanson, standing outside the courtroom, applying for permission to speak.

What we urgently need is a referendum that codifies a real freedom of political communication, not a made up one.

Until someone has the courage to hold such a referendum, here is my hope: a creative coalition of High Court justices who find that 18C is unconstitutional, and that the implied freedom is exactly what it looks like, nonsense.

This might create the political conditions for such a referendum to be required.

On the 18C industrial complex and the implied freedom brigade, my view is Kissinger’s. A pity both sides can’t lose.

Commonwealth gross debt will officially smash through the one trillion dollar mark today.

See in The Australian.

See in the AFR.

One. Trillion. Dollars.

From effectively zero to a thousand billion in roughly 20 years. This is economic arson. Bipartisan arson.

And before you assume this is the whole story, it is not even close.

Stack on top of that roughly $700 billion plus in state and territory debt, and Australia’s collective fiscal hole is about the size of Malcolm Turnbull’s ego.

The prize for most delinquent state goes, unsurprisingly, to Victoria, a jurisdiction where law and order went to die and fiscal responsibility followed shortly after. The eulogies are still being invoiced to taxpayers.

Dan Andrews may have shuffled out the door, but his legacy endures on the balance sheet like a structural defect discovered after settlement. Expensive, permanent, and entirely someone else’s problem apparently.

Cast your mind back to 2007. The Howard government, in one of its few positive legacies, left the books in net surplus. Zero net debt. A rainy day fund.

Then came the parade of Economic Morons: Wayne Swan, Chris Bowen, Joe Hockey, Scott Morrison, Josh Frydenberg, and now Jim Chalmers, each one gleefully seizing the spending hose and treating restraint as a personal affront.

COVID granted them a temporary free pass. The Reserve Bank kept bailing out stupid policy with negative to nil real interest rate.

But the spending never stopped after the emergency passed. It simply kept going. And going. And going.

Which brings me to our current Profligate-in-Chief, the indefatigable Jim Chalmers. A man who has spent the better part of four years loudly, proudly, and repeatedly informing anyone within microphone range that Labor has paid down debt.

PAID DOWN DEBT!

We have reduced Liberal Party debt by $177 billion,

he thundered.

We have banked upwards revisions and paid down debt,

his dingbat Finance Minister colleague Katie Gallagher dutifully and ignorantly echoed.

It has been practically the official jingle.

So here we are, Jim. A trillion dollars.

The scoreboard does not lie, and it does not care about your spin. The debt was not paid down. It was racked up.

To put it plainly, what was said was a blatant lie. To put it politely, it was dressed up, reframed, and benchmarked against a projection that never existed anywhere outside of a press release.

Gross debt has climbed from 5% of GDP to 37% in fifteen years. Interest on that debt is now the fastest growing line item in the budget, accelerating faster than the already catastrophically out of control NDIS.

And with inflation back and interest rates on the increase, the yield (interest rate paid on the debt) going up, the cost to service this debt will continue to the the fastest growing item in the budget.

The nation waits with bated breath for the Treasurer to explain how a $1,000,000,000,000 debt is actually proof of fiscal virtue.

He will no doubt blame the Coalition, although they are equally at fault.

But he will also no doubt blame the Reserve Bank, Donald Trump, Iran, the far right, climate change, global headwinds, overseas factors, supply chain echoes, post-pandemic residue, and possibly the tidal patterns of the Indian Ocean.

How it is the fault of anyone and anything other than him and his Prime Minister.

It will be creative, no doubt. Roughly as creative as the accounting that the Departments of Treasury and Finance have deployed on this government behalf for the better part of a decade.

Kiss your children and grand children because as Herbert Hoover wrote:

Blessed are the young for they shall inherit the national debt.

Hitting $1 trillion of debt for the first time is a feat never prior achieved in Australia’s history.

Chalmers will forever be marked with the scarlet letter T for trillion. No other Treasurer will ever be able to claim this mantle.

88 mentions of the word, in fact. Productivity manages 25, and 17 of them in the use of the (deceptively) named Produtivity Commission.

If you want the whole rot in one image, turn to Figure 3.1. There, in a box at the top of the page, in capitals, sits the phrase PRIMARY GOAL: EQUITY. Below it, in smaller boxes, demoted to what the report calls “secondary constraints,” huddle efficiency, sustainability and certainty.

Efficiency. A secondary constraint. At the Productivity Commission. This is analgous to

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The Albanese government has reportedly earmarked $1.5 billion for an Imperial Melons Farm to be drawn from new $10 billion Pissed Against The Wall Fund. This is the twin sister of the Future Made In Australia Fund.

The timing of this new fund and investment is immaculate.

The government arrived at a national melon strategy near the same time two gift melons from Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi has fallen into a diplomatic incident.

Because Prime Minister Albanese has appalling judgement, the logical solution to clean up his mess is not to apologise but to grow Australian melons under the policy of Sovereign Melon Capability.

As a sign of solidarity.

Treasurer and Chief Melon Head Jim Chalmers declared that through the new Pissed Against The Wall Fund, the government will de-risk a critical gap in the national cucurbit supply chain.

Now, the Prime Minister will always have access to cheap, subsidised melons, no matter the status in the Straits of Hormuz.

To implement this policy, a new Melon Taskforce will be established. It will be supported by the Office of Melon Coordination, with its 11 staff, 4 seconded from the Department of Vibes. International study tours will be required.

Treasury will provide modelling support meaning that the true cost will probably triple.

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A $40 million Melon Readiness Assessment has been prepared by Labor-aligned consultant and lobbying firm BS Strategies.

Food production is a priority of the Albanese government.

Late last year the National Reconstruction Fund put $45 million behind Arnott’s so Tim Tams could conquer Britain, a company owned by the American private equity giant KKR and not Australian owned since 1997.

Before that, $36 million to Patties Foods, maker of the Four’N Twenty pie, owned by PAG out of Hong Kong.

$1.5 billion. A first harvest of maybe 300 melons. Do that arithmetic and the Tomago bailout will sound a bargain.

And as an added bonus, PM DJ Albo can offer his special melons to Italian Prime Minister Georgia Meloni.

In America, an idea is treated as a possibility. In Australia, it’s treated as a compliance event.

What a perfect summation. It brought to my mind the words of the great Alexis de Tocqueville:

Society will develop a new kind of servitude which covers the surface of society with a network of complicated rules, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate. It does not tyrannise but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.

This later paragraph was written some 200 years ago and yet it perfectly describes Australia today.

The government as the shepherd and the citizenry as the sheep.

Baaaaah.

It takes about 15,000 kilowatt hours to make one tonne, which is why smelters get built next to Icelandic geothermal, Quebec hydro, or, once upon a time, and truly enormous piles of Hunter Valley coal.

Tomago is the single largest electricity user in New South Wales. Power is over 40 percent of its costs.

So here is a question that should not require a taskforce: if you spend a decade making Australian electricity dearer and flakier, what happens to the business that is essentially a machine for turning electrons into ingots?

Hmmm. Do you need to call a friend? Perhaps commission a KPMG study? Maybe even a Royal Commission?

Here is the simple answer. The business falls over. Or comes to the line of falling over.

At which point, the Prime Minister and the Premier fly in to heroically catch it.

The arsonists have arrived with a hose and a media pack.

The pitch is jobs. About 1,000 staff and 200 contractors, and good luck to all of them.

But nobody seems to be asking the rude question: were those jobs ever at risk before the policy to increase the cost and decrease the reliability of electricity showed up?

Tomago has run since 1983. It did not suddenly forget how to operate a pot line. The key input, electricity, suddenly got expensive and unpredictable. And this did not happen by weather.

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Australians were told for years that emissions-heavy, power-guzzling industry would have to adapt or exit. Tomago is the most emissions-heavy, power-guzzling operation in the country, and is now being paid not to exit.

Hold both thoughts at once and you may qualify for an SES Band 2.

Because that is the actual growth industry. Government and bureaucracy.

Make power expensive, staff it. Rebate the households, staff it. Rescue the smelter, staff it. Review whether any of it worked, staff it.

The total number of Australian public servants went from 1.75 million at June 2008 to 2.60 million in June 2025. That is another Tasmania of public servants.

Governments love to identify problems because every problem generates its own program, every program generates its own reviewers. In consulting, it is land and expand. In government it is land, never leave, and devour.

Textbooks will be written about how Australia turned into Argentina. Chances are that the government will seek to have it banned and the eSafety commissioner will block social media posts.

relief to Australians with a mortgage

A relief. Nothing happened to you today, so hold your gratitude until he finishes reading aloud his own report card.

Inflation is too high and prices are still climbing, just at a pace the Treasurer finds personally flattering, and this is presented as a gift bestowed. Your dollar buys less than last year. It will buy less next year.

And whose fault is that? Nobody’s in Canberra, obviously.

The war in the Middle East did it. Global uncertainty did it. What was inherited did it.

Far down that queue of villains stands a government that has spent like a lottery winner with terminal cancer, taxes like a parking inspector on commission, throttled its own energy supply, rewritten industrial relations to suit the public sector unions that bankroll the party, and delivered the worst productivity performance in sixty years.

This is never mentioned.

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Strip away the fog and the message to the Australian worker is 2 words long. First beginning with F. Second beginning with Y.

You will suffer. Not incidentally, but by design, because the suffering is the entry fee to the government’s utopian dreams.

The tradie on his sixth straight day, servicing a mortgage that costs double what it did three years ago, is not a problem to solve. He is a revenue line, working capital for a plan he never voted for, toward a destination that recedes at exactly the speed of his overtime.

And there is always a plan. Nearly 400,000 federal public servants and rising, on secure hours and indexed pay, planning a prosperity that never arrives for those funding it.

All animals are equal. But public servant animals are considerably more equal.

The expropriations will continue until everyone is equal. Equally poor. Except the governing class of course.

So let’s end the debate and call the race over.

The worst Treasurer in Australian history is not Jim Cairns, who at least had the grace to be gloriously ridiculous. It is not Josh Frydenberg, who merely flung open the vault during a pandemic. It is Jim Chalmers, and it is not close.

And the punchline; a man from the banana state is marching Australia into a banana republic.

Forty years ago Keating described that road precisely. His most devoted student, who wrote a thesis about him, is skipping down it in red slippers.

Keating still speaks about everything. He has not said this.

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Inflation is sitting at 3.8 per cent against a target band of 2 to 3 per cent. Take the midpoint, 2.5, which is already generous by international standards, and inflation is running more than 50 per cent above where the Reserve Bank itself says it should be.

That is not a rounding error or a margin of error. That is not a whisker outside the band. That is a miss you could park a container ship in.

And the RBA concedes the point in its own statement.

Inflation is too high. Trimmed mean inflation is elevated and has barely shifted. Businesses are putting prices up and more of them want to.

On the Bank’s own projection, inflation does not get back near the midpoint until late 2027, and even that comes with upside risks attached.

So the Board looks at a year and a half of Australians being quietly stripped of their savings and their wages, and decides the appropriate response is to sit still and assess how things are evolving.

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Yes, the Board has moved three times this year. That is precisely why stopping now is the wrong call. You do not abandon the course of antibiotics because the fever has come down a bit.

Then look at who is around the table. A Monetary Policy Board appointed by Jim Chalmers, with the Secretary to the Treasury sitting on it, the same Treasury that drafts the Treasurer’s budget.

Independence is a lovely word. It is also just a word.

They will say rates are the only tool they have. True. But rates have second and third order effects, and one of them is shining a very large spotlight on the fiscal and public policy incompetence that is feeding the inflation in the first place.

A hike is a verdict on the government and the RBA has shown a consistent reluctance to deliver one.

This is the same institution that cut rates just before the last election. It bailed the government out then. It is bailing them out now.

I take no pleasure in any of this. I have a big arsed mortgage of my own and a hike hurts me as much as anyone reading this. But I would rather take my medicine now than watch the cancer that is the Albanese economic program metastasise.

Welcome to the banana republic.