Make no mistake, Australia is about to enter a profound economic crisis that is likely to reshape our society and our politics.
You don’t have to take my word for it. This week, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese likened the coming shock to the Covid-19 pandemic, which fundamentally altered the way we all live and work.
On Thursday, the Treasurer, Jim Chalmers, compared the looming economic earthquake to both the pandemic and the global financial crisis, the two most consequential global events of the past 20 years
The political ramifications of both of these events, and the associated economic fallout, are still being felt today. Since the financial crisis, the top 10 per cent of Australian income earners have taken 93 per cent of our economic growth. Since the pandemic, the price of everything is higher, but wages haven’t kept up. This record high wealth inequality and the atomisation of the workforce and society directly fed into the rise of Donald Trump and far-right figures like him all over the world.
But unlike a virus or the greed of American bankers, the new crisis that Albanese and Chalmers are warning us about, is the result of something they support: the US and Israel’s war on Iran.
The likely impacts of the war on everything from trade, to oil prices, to inflation, to geopolitics, to domestic political unrest, were obvious to many of us from day one, but politicians and journalists in Australia have been slow to comprehend how severe they would be – either out of ignorance, or an unwillingness to acknowledge the consequences of actions they support.
The fact that even the Prime Minister, who was the first world leader to throw his support behind the war and has cemented Australia’s place as the closest military and political ally of Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, is now sounding the alarm should erase any doubt that what’s coming is going to be momentous.
