The times might suit Josh

THE just awful 44-56 Newspoll in our sister paper The Australian actually kicks new Prime Minister Scott Morrison off to the best possible start he could have hoped for.

He’s like an incoming CEO whose first – and canniest – move is to dig all the skeletons (real or, if necessary, imagined) out of his predecessor’s cupboard; announce red ink all over the bottom line; and so the only way he and the company can then go, is up.

The worst possible thing for a new CEO to inherit is a fabulous record profit; it will most likely set him or her up for a big fall. The same would have been the danger with Morrison if Newspoll had printed at 56-44 instead.

Now of course “we” wouldn’t have had the excitement and somewhat second-rate entertainment of the past week and Morrison wouldn’t be heading for The Lodge this week, if his “CEOpredecessor” had been producing those sorts of poll numbers.

Once again, we’ve seen a lot of nonsense written about the Newspoll, attributing it all to the turbulence of the last week. We just don’t know. The only way we could really know was if the turbulence had come after it.

While that would have given us all clarity, was a

POLLING is one thing, the economy is a very different matter – it could head in either direction.

Quite which would be better for the Government politically is “complicated” – would people really want to vote for Bill Shorten’s even higher power prices if they were losing their jobs or hurting on their mortgages?

That aside, if you look through the more hysterical observations – the property market is going to collapse and mortgage defaults soar; President Trump is going to plunge the world into a 1930s-style trade war and presumably another Great Depression; or more “everyday” possible disasters like a share market collapse and another GFC – both the local economy and the global one are actually in reasonable shape.

No, I am not saying they are in great shape, or there not aren’t a lot of potential disasters lurking out there; and, more generally, we are never going back to the “good old days” of simple generalised good times.

The 21st century is too volatile, too complicated, and too over-geared (a euphemism for: we are no longer up to our ears in debt, but the debt is now way, way above them).

But, led by the US with more than a little help from China, the global economy is ticking over pretty reasonably around a low inflation 3-3.5 per cent growth level.

The latest OECD figures today will show OECD growth around 2.5 per cent (the US itself is closer to 3 per cent).

That translates to sustained healthy prices for our major commodity exports and more and more Chinese tourists still coming south.

This feeds into pretty solid growth across the Aussie Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard – that we have seen in decades: As evidenced by both the Fairfax-Ipsos poll – before the eruptions and when, according to the “leading lights” of the Press Gallery, Turnbull was in masterful command – and

the Australian-Newspoll

after them.

Whatever, the core point is that Morrison can now really head in only one direction.

The question is only whether he gets to, say, a still-losing 49 per cent by election day, or whether he can get to 51 per cent or higher. Or indeed, whether he stays, disastrously, in the mid-40s.

He clearly has immeasurably superior political skills to Turnbull. He needs to have them working off effective policies to deliver believably lower power prices and some cut in too-high immigration.

He won’t go down the dead-end of his opponent’s “thought bubble” of removing the GST on power prices.

The proposed “heavying” of power companies is also undesirable, but could work as a limited fix in

with sensible promotion of real power generation.

The Opposition and especially its leader, Bill Shorten, are begging, just begging, to be shredded on both fronts. economy; jobs are still being created and reports of the death of the property market are at least somewhat overstated.

Yes, wages are static but the good news off that reality is inflation staying low – and critically as a consequence, both the official Reserve Bank interest rate and market rates.

The slippage in the Aussie dollar towards US70c is not only a further goodnews story, but exactly what we should want to see to maintain down under stability in the face of further rises in US interest rates.

All of this plays out into not handing new Treasurer Josh Frydenberg a Budget deficit headache.

As he learns on the job he can be a “good news” treasurer like his new mentor, Peter Costello, not a fiscal fiend.

At least, all importantly, through the election.