David Littleproud was spruiking the idea that the excise on beer should be frozen… unlike those English bastards we like our beer cold so just using the words “frozen” and “beer” should have been a vote winner. However, it seems that this was just a thought bubble from the Nationals leader which had no support from the rest of the Coalition, even if a couple of them praised the man for actually having a thought, which is quite an achievement for a Nationals MP.

It was interesting that they shut down the idea without further discussion. Although when I say “interesting”, I actually mean typical of the goings-on in Canberra lately. It was Otto Von Bismarck who said that politics was “the art of the possible”…

Actually the full quote is: “Politics is the art of the possible, the attainable — the art of the next best.” This leads me to believe that – like much of what happens these days – Otto had just been rolled and that he had to adapt his plans without looking too much like a loser…

Whatever led Von Bismarck to say that, I suspect that he wasn’t having as bad a time as the Labor Party recently.

The Coalition grew concerned that the changes to Reserve Bank would enable Labor to stack the interest rate setting part of the Bank with their mates because, after all, that’s what the Liberal Party would do. Why would it be terrible to have an interest rate setting group composed of Labor sympathisers? Well, we politicians all agree that interest rates are putting pressure on households and that they should come down but if you had too many comrades making decisions then they might come down before the election and then Peter Dutton would have no hope of being able to win, even with his promise to bring down power prices once he gets his nuclear plants up and running in 2035.

There was the suggestion that Labor could negotiate with The Greens but this is even harder than trying to work with the Liberal Party. Lately the tactics of The Greens seems to be to announce that they won’t let something through because it’s a bad policy but, in spite of it being a bad policy, Labor should negotiate so that they can claim credit if people like it. Their most recent tactic is to add something that is almost impossible to do but sounds good.

For example, the demand that Jim Chalmers override the RBA and lower interest rates has a number of problems. First, it completely undermines the independence of the Reserve Bank. This is a problem because they make decisions without considering whether they’re popular or not and this has its advantages even if they occasionally get it wrong. Secondly, if the Treasurer did use his power to lower interest rates, he’d have a political problem because the next thing would be that he’d be attacked for doing it, as well as being attacked for not doing it sooner. Yes, this is illogical but you only have to remember that, in 2019, Bill Shorten’s policy on negative gearing was going to raise the price of houses for buyers and lower the price for owners. Finally, if he lowered them once, there’d be speculation after each RBA decision whether he’d do it again which would mean that economists would be interviewed even more often and I think that we can all agree that the less we see of economists the better…

To be perfectly fair, there are some good economists but I can’t think of many because they rarely get interviewed. I mean, I often wonder what’s the point of interviewing a disciple of the free market capitalist economic theory when all they’re going to tell you is that the market knows best and there’s no need for any government interference. If that’s right, then why do we need the economist to advise us when we can just leave it to the market?

Whatever, I think that we need an election so we can get a boost to the economy from Clive Palmer’s advertising spending.