Can we afford to have a trainee treasurer?

DO you think it might be a good idea for a federal treasurer – purportedly overseeing a $625bn-a-year budget, and increasing inexorably every year because that’s what politicians always do: always spend more and more of your money – to have some understanding of the basics of arithmetic?

Like, for example, that 36 per cent of something is bigger than 33 per cent?

In just his first three days in the job, newbie treasurer Jim Chalmers has shown a decided tendency to let his mouth run way ahead of whatever passes for his brain.

On the first day, he thought it would be a good idea to declare that inflation was “almost out of control”.

As I explained that was utterly ludicrous.

It was also grossly irresponsible; coming from a treasurer – even a trainee one – the equivalent of shouting ‘fire’ in a crowded cinema.

He clearly had not the slightest idea of the immediate policy questions that posed – to him, personally.

Like, why isn’t he calling for the Reserve Bank to really hike interest rates, like immediately matching the 2 per cent NZ policy rate?

Like, why isn’t he taking active steps to force big pay rises across the workforce, lamenting as he did the big fall in real wages – falls, which will get much bigger as a consequence of that “almost out of control inflation”?

Then on the third day, he didn’t rise to his position and the tasks he faces, but choose to make a gratuitous attack on the Liberals likely selection of Peter Dutton as leader.

It showed, he opined, they’d learned nothing from the “drubbing” they got on Saturday.

Hmm. What the Liberals and their Coalition partners the Nationals got on Saturday was 36 per cent of the first preference vote. What Labor got was 33 percent.

Some 36 per cent of Australians actively wanted Scott Morrison to continue as prime minister; only 33 per cent – closer to 500,000 fewer – actively wanted Anthony Albanese to replace him.

So if 36 per cent is a “drubbing”, what then, Treasurer, is 33 per cent?

Or is basic arithmetic above your pay grade?

Yes, of course, second – and third and fourth – preferences got Labor to a majority, or just shy, of seats and government.

Albanese is the PM and Morrison is not.

But the idea there was this massive rush to Albanese and Labor is an utter fantasy of leftist propaganda.

Despite this being the notorious ‘fourth’ election which is supposedly all-but impossible to win, and a PM supposedly hated by all-but half-a-dozen women, Labor just limped over the line with the lowest first-preference vote on any election winner.

Despite all that, nearly 500,000 Australians – some of whom might even have been women – specifically preferred Morrison over Albanese as their first choice.

This goes to the broader question of the Liberal Party – or more broadly, the ‘right’ being in supposed crisis.

The truth is the exact opposite.

In an election in which, yes, there clearly was a swing away from the right, the mainstream right still outpolled the mainstream left.

The right – the Coalition, Pauline Hanson, Clive Palmer’s UAP and the Lib Dems got just shy of 47 per cent of the vote.

The left – Labor and the Greens – got just shy of 45 percent.

Even adding on the socalled Teals, gets the left total only up to just over 46 per cent, still shy of the right vote.

The other 7 per cent, all the rag-tags, might or might not be ‘left’, it is certainly crazy.

The primary lesson is that we have a treasurer who needs to get some remedial instruction in basic arithmetic.

Until he does, the less he says the better.