Embarrassing farce as Anthony Albanese shows total ignorance of key economic facts in trainwreck ABC interview, writes PETER VAN ONSELEN

Our Prime Minister clearly has absolutely no idea about Australia’s economic data. Or he is deliberately misleading voters.

I choose to believe he is incompetent rather than deceitful—a limited version of the lesser evil.

In an extraordinary display of ignorance in an ABC radio interview this morning, Anthony Albanese claimed that the U.S. economy is growing more slowly than ours. He used this (false) fact to explain why U.S. interest rates are falling but ours are not.

When asked why US interest rates are falling while ours are not, the prime minister came up with the following false excuse: “Because the (US) economy is so slow, that’s why they are cutting rates.”

Really? The US economy is growing faster than the Australian economy, by quite a margin.

Does Albo admit that his government is struggling with a struggling economy and slow growth?

Or is he just ignorant of the data coming out of the US? Doesn’t he get briefings on these things? Or does he get them but doesn’t bother to read them?

There are really no good explanations for why a prime minister is so poorly informed.

As Harvard economist Professor Richard Holden told Daily Mail Australia:

“It is very strange that the Prime Minister says the Fed has cut rates because their ‘economy is so slow’ compared to Australia’s.

‘The US economy grew at an annual rate of 3 percent in the most recent quarter, compared with 0.8 percent for Australia.’

So the US economy is growing almost four times as fast as the Australian economy. But the prime minister says US economic growth is ‘so slow’.

That is a devastating criticism of Finance Minister Jim Chalmers’ job of managing Australia’s economy.

Professor Holden is right with his numbers, while the Prime Minister seems lost.

Which begs the question: why doesn’t our Prime Minister actually know how the Australian economy compares to the American one?

Believe it or not, Albo’s economic ignorance doesn’t stop there. In a further attempt to justify why rates are falling in the US but not here, the prime minister added: “Inflation peaked higher in the United States and interest rates peaked higher in the United States than here.”

That statement is at least factually true, even though it doesn’t help Albo’s argument one bit.

The fact that inflation in the US is higher than ever before only underscores how well America has managed to get inflation under control since then.

It is now just 2.5 percent in the US and is forecast to fall further, much lower than Australia’s latest quarterly inflation rate of 3.8 percent, which actually rose from the previous quarter.

Professor Holden is also scathing about the Prime Minister’s attempt to portray the US as a country that is mismanaging its economy, compared to the way Australia is dealing with various economic challenges:

“What is he talking about? The US has raised rates, beaten inflation, a strong economy and is now cutting rates. In Australia it is almost the exact opposite.”

“The bigger question is why the Prime Minister doesn’t seem to understand this,” Professor Holden adds.

Although Albo was wrong to give his views on interest rates and inflation when asked, he indicated in the same interview that he knew nothing about tax policy.

Asked whether his government was considering changes to negative gearing and capital gains tax, Albo replied: “I don’t answer those kinds of questions.”

That’s really remarkable, given that Labor is trying to claim that it has the answers to the concerns about affordable housing in the community. I think he’s just the Prime Minister.

No wonder the Greens and the coalition are embarrassing the Labour Party on this issue.

Recent opinion polls show that voters have little confidence in the Labour Party’s ability to tackle everything from the economy to cost-of-living challenges and the housing crisis.

As bad as it is when a prime minister refuses to answer simple questions about tax policy, it at least ensures he doesn’t get the facts wrong on another economic talking point in the same interview.

Perhaps Albo should also have refused to answer questions about inflation and interest rates, just as he chose to remain silent on tax policy?

As former US President Abraham Lincoln once said, “It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.”

If you think I’m being unnecessarily harsh about Albo’s failed interview, please note that during the interview he also made some sharp comments about the quality of the questions asked.

When ABC Radio National presenter Patricia Karvelas asked her for an answer at one point, a clearly grumpy Albo replied: “They’re not exactly smart questions.”

It was a clear sign that he knew his spin, bravado and false stories weren’t working.

Not that Chalmers fared much better. When he emerged for his morning political interviews, the finance minister tried to argue: “In terms of the Australian situation, we’ve got pretty significant inflation.”

Really? As mentioned earlier, the latest quarterly figures went in the wrong direction, with inflation at 3.8 per cent, well above the Reserve Bank’s target of 2-3 per cent.

And while the latest monthly results showed a slight improvement, as the RBA noted, this is largely artificial as government energy cuts distort the data in the short term.

So whether it is the Prime Minister or the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the political leaders who run our multi-billion dollar economy seem unable to read the data that everyone has access to and honestly and accurately convey what it tells us.

Albo made quite a point ahead of the last federal election about former Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s poor handling of the truth.

Now that he is prime minister, things are no better for Albo.