The Intergenerational Report (IGR) for the last 20 years has warned us that the era of magic pudding politics is fast coming to a close.  Last week, it declared it over.  

Simply put Australians will be poorer over the next 40 years.  We can no longer squander our precious resources, tax and regulate our entrepreneurs out of existence, and continue to squib hard facts in the face of rent seeking special interests who fund political parties of the left.  

The 1970s taught us a clear and incontrovertible lesson, that government largesse allowed to go unchecked and unchallenged ultimately leads to stagflation.  Unemployment hurts the unemployed, inflation hurts the assetless, stagflation hurts everyone.  

Those on the Left remember how great their 1970s privilege felt, accumulating large swathes of economic resources and political power for themselves at the cost of everyone else.  They have convinced themselves that the problem wasn’t policy but branding.  What they needed was… rebranding.  

And so here we are.  

Paul Krugman, the Nobel prize winning left wing economist and New York Times columnist, jokes that if you laid every economist in the world end to end, you still wouldn’t reach a conclusion.  Except for rent control.  

According to Krugman the only thing that can unite economists is their agreement that rent controls make things worse.  He has never heard of the Australia Institute, the Greens and Teals.  They think it is an obvious solution to our housing crisis.  What constantly surprises is that no one can ever seems to report that these are the very same people who created the housing crisis, and the resulting wealth inequality.  

It must be nice to be able to simultaneously create a problem and to pretend to care about it too.

This is just the Greens and Teals people say, however, this faulty reasoning is what lead to the biggest subsidisation of coal companies in our history.  

Faced with a blowout in wholesale energy prices caused by Chris Bowen’s magical energy transition plan where everyone gets a Unicorn, the left in the guise of Labor, the Greens and Teals voted for price caps that resulted in $900m plus compensation bill for some of the most profitable coal companies in the world.  

You may want to stop and think about that.  The Teals, within a year of getting elected, voted for legislation that resulted in the largest transfer of taxpayer funds ever to coal companies, including those owned by overseas investors.  

We are ready for our lecture on integrity now.  

When Chris Bowen talks about border adjustment taxes, what he is really talking about is tariffs.  The same policy that took nearly three decades to unwind, and four decades to defeat, is resurrected with a simple rebranding.  

The damage that tariffs did to working Australians, our children, our economy and our national psyche, while enriching the underserving privileged, cannot be understated.  Yet here we are on the verge of breezily reintroducing them without any serious discussion.  

Ah the power of rebranding.

The IGR cannot scream it louder: the party is over, it is about to get a lot tougher, the path to prosperity is clear but it rests on properly considered policies based on the values of real equality, compassion, fairness and freedom.  Most of all it means rejecting feel-good fact-free vibes for the economic wisdom that government is not the answer to our problems but too often the cause.  

It is a fundamental truth based on a long hard history; to do anything else risks the stagflation of ye olde times, and that is not rebranding.