Forks in the road

Henry Johnston

6 years ago

I struggle with long-form essays drafted by economics writers. Like many, I am easily fazed by complex yet important observations crafted by a coterie of well-respected econometricians.

But of all the millions of words written for and against the undetailed or overtly specific party political policies, the truest summation of Australia’s current predicament fell to those who report on the science that deals with the production, distribution, and consumption of goods.

On Monday, May 20 the Australian Stock Market recorded a healthy bounce, but within cooee of this breathless fan prose published in The Australian Financial Review, and spurred on by its managing editor-in-chief Michael Stutchbury, Prime Minister Scott Morrison AKA the Messiah from The Shire contradicted Simon Benson’s story, saying tax cuts would be pushed back by 12 months.

Gee that didn’t take long!

The reality of the current state of the Australian economy, repeated ad nauseam throughout the election campaign by respected econometricians of all stripes, is dire. Classicists, demand-siders, macro and micro boffins, monetarists and supply-side champions, mostly agree: the nation is already in recession.

Indeed the good folk of far North Queensland will tell you their daily lives unfold in the midst of a localised depression, exacerbated by a terrible summer flood. Yet these same Australian citizens chose to believe in a non-existent coal rush of jobs set to unfold in an uneconomic financial mess called the Carmichael Mine located somewhere in Queensland’s vast Galilee Basin.

The bleak appearance of shuttered shop fronts in Townsville and Gladstone is now regretfully, a reality in inner-city enclaves in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, and other towns and cities. But this is as nothing to a coterie of citizens who made a small fortune on the ALP’s franking credits fiasco as reported by Michael Pascoe in today’s The New Daily.

But to quote the old Sydney race caller Ken Howard, you can bet London to a Brick that not one of those angry, disaffected citizens in the deep north or the far, far west, read Pascoe’s report. Chances are they chose the prognostications of Terry McCrann, who a few days back penned an article with the headline, Why Pauline and Clive are our saviours, published in The Herald-Sun and syndicated across News Corp mastheads.

Like Michael Pascoe, Terry McCrann is also an economics writer.

But I think it fair to say describing Pauline Hanson and Clive Palmer as our saviours, pushes the messianic metaphor just a little too hard. But hey; this is the reality of the era of Prime Minister Scott Morrison.

To put economic reporting in perspective, it is worth browsing a website which processes trillions of financial transactions a year.

The enormity of the world economy is summarised by the brief of a company which describes itself as, ‘the central nervous system of global finance’.

Each day Bloomberg deploys Big Science to lubricate this central nervous system. Every minute it feeds the most advanced data on the planet to its reporters who then analyse everything from climate glitches such as hurricanes to the likelihood of nuclear war in the Middle East.

And in Australia Michael Pascoe, Ross Gittins, Elysse Morgan, Alan Kohler and many more fine business and finance journalists, distil local sources and Bloomberg and Reuters stories as well as those published in other reputable economic conduits, to keep Australia appraised of real, as opposed to fake news.

And yet when it comes to decoding the science of where our finances are actually heading, last Saturday some Australians chose to elect a scientific sceptic par excellence to the incoming Senate.

I leave you with this lucid explanation of Carbon Dioxide in Perspective by the Galileo Movement and urge you never doubt the stupidity of an electorate which never gets it wrong!