The Lizard King in Crisis Talks

The Lizard family has lived through a lot over the years and even a crisis. In the case of the Great Financial Crisis, the GFC, everything changed in a matter of a few weeks. Markets crashed, banks folded, wholesale redundancies, property crash, and a genuine global effort to right the ship with financial accommodation coordinated by governments, central banks and the like. The Asian financial crisis was brutal in several Asian countries and not really felt in Australia. Two crises that I can remember.

The recent federal election bore much turmoil. We were listening to the soon-to-be-governing opposition’s crisis call on just about everything that sent this lizard into deep decline.

Cost-of-Living crisis! Flood Emergency crisis! Energy crisis! Climate crisis! Budget crisis! Debt crisis! Housing Affordability crisis! Scomo credibility crisis and, of course, an inflation crisis!

And so they got elected as these crises needed a swift and decisive fix. Over the last few months, the incoming Treasurer, Dr Jim Chalmers, has continued to refer to the problems and emergencies across the political and financial landscape as these were things needing urgent attention.

The budget emergency, budget repair, and the parlous state of the economy (so we are led to believe) need urgent and decisive action; otherwise, we were all doomed, it seemed.

Of course, with full employment (and the lowest in history youth unemployment) and booming export earnings that have turned around the budget emergency in record time, one could be forgiven for thinking there is such a crisis.

Chalmers was nonetheless softening the electorate for decisive action. All of this mess needed a big fix. Nothing was off the table – even the legislated Stage 3 tax cuts, supposedly “L-A-W”, might not be the right thing to do in such a crisis.

There was talk of superannuation taxes, resource rent tax increases, carbon tax and even whispers of a mining tax. Talk around the Lizard family dining table was, “Well, the people elected this government, and so I suppose they have the mandate to fix all these crises”.

And what of all this talk?

Dr Chalmers had the floor with his budget last week. We had the backgrounding in the media, the op-ed pieces, and we were all braced for some big fix policies necessary to right the parlous state of financial affairs that were presented.

We should call him Dr Jim “Crickets” Chalmers after last week’s vacuous budget! We heard not one new policy to address all the crises, only a broken promise of lower power bills.

All we got was budget predictions of worse-to-come-on energy prices, worse to come on inflation, worse to come on interest rates. The Cost of Living crisis is only going to worsen.

Jim Chalmers’s arse must now look like a fertile lithium outcrop for the Libs to target following this paltry performance!

All the crises that Labor inherited are now their own crises because they’ve been in office since April and have had the opportunity of 6 months and budget to make some progress,  but they’ve kicked the can down the road.

This four-year term is going to be a long one!

Similar puzzlement in WA politics.

Sneakers McGowan has more power and more money than God. The traditional Labor core areas of police, healthcare and teachers are in a real crisis, not one just whipped up by the PR agencies at election time.

We can’t even recruit enough people to fill the positions, yet McGowan can’t possibly pay them a fair wage increase for the additional workloads.

In the last mining boom, there was a health crisis in WA with over 1000 hours a month of ramping. The nursing union held mass rallies and strikes, and the liberal government of the day was forced to agree to wage rises to make the WA nurses the best paid in the country, which was necessary in the worker shortages of the times.

In 2022 we now have over 7000 hours of ambulance ramping a month and chaos in the health sector with overloaded nurses and staff leaving the profession in droves. The bedraggled WA liberals are even saying, “Come on, Sneakers, just give them a pay rise”, and yet, despite the billions in royalties filling his offers, he won’t.

More strikes are ahead for the nurses, the police and teachers. The Lizard King’s gut tells him we won’t see Sneakers spending much of his billions until before the next election. That’s another three years away….a long time for more rallies and strikes!

Back at the Lizard family, the talk has moved to another one of cricket’s crises – with the Australian top-order batting – now that crisis DOES need some urgent attention!

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