Share and Follow
Jim Chalmers has accused critics of his 6,000-word essay on remaking capitalism of ‘hyperventilating’.
The Treasurer’s essay published in The Monthly has been widely panned by both sides of the ideological spectrum.
But Dr Chalmers hit back on Sunday with an address to the Labor-aligned Chifley Research Centre in Canberra.
‘We’ve had the usual hyperventilating from the usual suspects – some with such intensity it seemed they might spontaneously combust,’ he said.
‘But I’m not too troubled – I’m relaxed and realistic about the commentary.
‘In most cases they’re responding to a dodgy caricature of the essay, not the essay itself.’
Jim Chalmers has accused critics of his 6,000-word essay on remaking capitalism of ‘hyperventilating’ (the Treasurer is pictured on Sunday addressing the Chifley Research Centre in Canberra)
Dr Chalmers, who did his PhD on Paul Keating as Labor prime minister, also denied he had abandoned Labor’s free market reforms undertaken during the 1980s and 1990s.
‘So the same things that worked for Paul in 1983 are not going to be the same things that I’ll reach for in 2023,’ he told the event at the National Press Club.
‘That is as absurd as somebody saying to Paul when he fronted up with Treasury for the first time 40 years ago and saying what we need you to do is copy Ben Chifley’s policies as treasurer 40 years before that.
‘It’s really quite remarkable: Chifley – 40 years – Keating, as treasurer, and 40 years until now.’
Mr Keating as treasurer was instrumental in floating the Australian dollar in 1983 and later led the push within cabinet to privatise the Commonwealth Bank and airline Qantas.
Mr Chifley in 1947 had sought to nationalise Australia’s private banks when he was simultaneously both the prime minister and treasurer, leading to Labor losing the 1949 election and staying out of power for 23 years.
Read Related Also: Democrat Nominee Don Davis Grossly Mismanaged Government Funds as Mayor of Snow Hill, NC
The Treasurer’s essay published in The Monthly has been widely panned with his detractors coming from both sides of the ideological spectrum (Jim Chalmers is pictured, centre, at the Australian Open tennis with his wife Laura, right)
Later as PM, Mr Keating in 1993 introduced enterprise bargaining where wage rises weren’t automatically replicated across an entire industry to avoid a repeat of the wage-price spiral curse of the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s Secure Jobs, Better Pay Act is reviving multi-employer bargaining, following a decade of wages growth being stuck below the long-term average of three per cent.
Conservative News Corp columnist Piers Akerman likened Dr Chalmers’s essay to Russian dictator Joseph Stalin’s command economy during the 1920s to the 1950s, with the Treasurer’s essay advocating for the government to ‘co-invest’ in renewable energy.
‘His appointment as Treasurer has triggered such a rush of blood to the head that he now feels competent to deliver a manifesto on economics that makes the old Communist Five Year plans look like models of economic rationalism,’ Akerman wrote in the Sunday newspapers.
Akerman also suggested Dr Chalmers as Treasurer had more in common with former Labor PM Gough Whitlam’s left-wing treasurer Jim Cairns – who presided over 17.7 per cent inflation in early 1975 – than Mr Keating.
‘The Chalmers’ declaration would effectively reverse the lauded reforms of the Hawke-Keating years and bring back an old-fashioned Whitlamesque command economy,’ he said.
Conservative News Corp columnist Piers Akerman (pictured) likened Dr Chalmers’s essay to Russian dictator Joseph Stalin’s command economy during the 1920s to the 1950s, with the essay advocating for the government to ‘co-invest’ in renewable energy
Dr Chalmers also had critics from the economic left with Steven Hamilton, a visiting fellow at the Australian National University’s Tax and Transfer Policy Institute, mocking the essay for being vacuous.
‘We got an incoherent assortment of kumbaya capitalist thought bubbles – the kinds of ideas you might expect from a bunch of virtue-signalling CEOs attending a wellness retreat,’ he in an opinion piece for The Sydney Morning Herald.
The Treasurer’s essay – Capitalism After The Crises – slammed former Liberal treasurer Josh Frydenberg in 2020 for mocking Labor over its adoption of former New Zealand Labour prime minister Jacinda Ardern’s ‘wellbeing’ budget ideas.
‘When Labor spoke about a wellbeing budget; the then federal Treasurer guffawed in Question Time about yoga mats and incense,’ Dr Chalmers said.
‘Not only did he miss the preponderance of yoga studios in his own electorate or misread the fast-growing South Asian faith communities around Australia, he misunderstood people’s appetite for a more conscious sense of wellbeing.
‘He missed perhaps the key lesson of the pandemic: that healthy economies rely on healthy people and communities.’
