It’s everyone else’s fault

The worst reaction to the situation would be for the government to decide it needs to get consumer spending going again. Figures show that the personal savings we were spending during the last few years are almost exhausted. We need a pause while the economy realigns. Trying to ramp up spending at the moment will just make things worse and run national savings down even further. If interest rates come down there will be some relief, but there is not a lot of room for them to come down as they are at historically fairly normal levels at the moment.

The sort of spending the country needs is investment. Economists tend to think that investment and spending are two different categories, but this is absurd. Investment isn't an abstract dollar hanging around somewhere, it is dollars spent on productive assets which have to be built or bought and, in the process, involves quite a lot of spending.

Government spending would only help if it were directed into increasing investment in assets that have a positive return. Unfortunately, the current government's record says that even when it spends money on assets it is most likely to direct increased expenditure into activities that destroy wealth rather than creating it, like the Capacity Investment Scheme where the government undertakes to subsidise renewable generation because it is unprofitable without a subsidy.

If they want to spend government money on infrastructure, one of their best options at the moment would be the second Bruce Highway which they are apparently refusing to fund.

Gentleman Jim won't fix any of these things. The Greens see themselves as Robin Hoods, but the ALP has always been (with some honourable exceptions) a bushranging operation.

Having spent the last three or so years, and the eight between 2007 and 2015, redesigning the economy to more efficiently deliver other people's money to unions and the social welfare rentier class, the only job left to Labor is deflecting blame to some straw man (or perhaps in the era of DEI, straw woman).

That can be 'global economic uncertainty', or Peter Dutton, 'the most divisive leader of a major political party in Australia's modern history'.

A bit of advice to Jim. Unless you want to be a bushranger all your life, owning your own mistakes would be a good habit to develop.