STEPHEN JOHNSON: Albo has wrecked our economy and left us poorer than we were seven years ago – here are the two major changes he needs to make NOW

Anthony Albanese is Australia’s worst economic manager in more than a generation – and that is no exaggeration.

He has achieved the unthinkable feat of presiding over an embarrassing plunge in living standards despite record high government spending.

Under Labor’s watch, Australians have seen the biggest decline in disposable income among OECD countries, and households have less money to spend than seven years ago.

After paying taxes, the average Australian is poorer than when Labor came to power in 2022.

And apart from Covid lockdowns, the economy is growing at the slowest pace since the 1991 recession.

Yet the Reserve Bank of Australia has stated that it will not cut interest rates any time soon because inflation is still too high.

Borrowers are getting help in New Zealand, the United States, Britain, Canada and across Europe, and their incomes are rising.

But Australians are still struggling with monthly mortgage repayments that are almost double what they were when Labor won the 2022 election after the heaviest interest rate hikes since 1989.

While Australia is not in a technical recession, it has been in a per capita recession since early last year.

Every Australian’s output of goods and services has fallen for seven straight quarters, exacerbating the country’s productivity crisis.

This per capita recession is even worse than the stagflation era of the early 1980s, when unemployment and inflation were in double digits at the same time.

Now Treasurer Jim Chalmers has taken the extraordinary step of blaming Labor governments’ spending on public sector spending reaching a record high in the September quarter.

“The majority of this was state expenditure, with the majority of the Commonwealth share being defense expenditure,” he said in a press release on Thursday.

“State and local spending represented 60 percent of public demand growth in the quarter.”

This Labor government of former university student activists is choosing to point the finger at someone else rather than act like political adults.

So far the government has ignored this Numerous warnings from Michele Bullock – the Reserve Bank Governor appointed by Labor no less – that both levels of government are spending too much money.

EY chief economist Cherelle Murphy commented: ‘It’s hard to find a government in Australia that doesn’t have a record capital program over the next four years.”

The Labor governments of New South Wales and Victoria would not have had to spend record sums of tens of billions on new rail infrastructure projects if it had not been for record high immigration.

Immigration is a federal issue, so it is time for the Albanian government to actually do something.

Many of the record 500,000 migrants to Australia each year are moving to Sydney and Melbourne, increasing pressure on the transport network.

Previous Labor governments have cut immigration during an economic crisis; under Paul Keating the number fell to below 35,000 in 1993 so he could prioritize tackling high unemployment.

Rather than giving in to big business and the university lobby, the Albanian government could at least halve immigration immediately.

In fact, that’s what they promised to do in the May budget, but they still haven’t even vaguely delivered on it.

Labor could demonstrate that it is in charge and above the demands of special interests.

After all, rising population growth has hardly been able to keep Australia from a miserable economic growth rate of 0.8 percent.

A population slowdown would at least take the pressure off services inflation.

It has been 18 months since Dr Chalmers – who promoted Keating as Prime Minister – made the extraordinary claim that the federal government had no control over immigration.

“That is not a government policy or a government objective,” he told ABC’s Q+A programme.

‘It’s not a floor or a ceiling, it’s not something the government determines.’

Excuse me? Then why on earth do we elect governments?

First, the Albanian government claims that it does not control immigration.

Then it blames someone else for government spending reaching a record 28 percent of GDP or gross domestic product.

With iron ore prices set to fall next year, Canberra will collect less revenue from business taxes.

No doubt Labor will resort to its usual tactic of blaming someone else – or citing so-called ‘global factors’.

With an election coming next year, Labor should grow a backbone and tackle wasteful government spending by scaling back the Future Made in Australia green manufacturing subsidy program.

It must stop pandering to the Greens who want renewable energy to make up 82 percent of Australia’s energy mix by 2030 – a political goal that will be very expensive to achieve.

Reducing immigration rather than spending more money is certainly the best way to reduce future carbon emissions. Just a thought.

Labor has welcomed two successive budget surpluses but has played down forecasts of deficits for the coming years.

Dr. Chalmers denied EY’s chief economist’s accusation of “a sad economy without much hope,” preferring to dismiss that observation with the following sentence: “I don’t share the bleakest of these assessments.”

Admitting a problem is the first step to tackling it, but that seems beyond this administration.

To use a Gough Whitlam phrase beloved of Labor True Believers: it’s time to take some damn responsibility.