Treasurer Jim Chalmers’ promotion of “Chinese-style socialism under the banner ‘stakeholder capitalism’” has come under fire by an Australian business veteran during Sky News’ Real Economic Round Table.
Nationals Senator Matt Canavan invited an array of leaders for a roundtable to discuss Australia’s flailing productivity and energy woes.
It took place as Mr Chalmers convenes Labor’s private productivity summit in Canberra with an array of business, union and policy figures.
Among the atendees of the Real Economic Round Table was Maurice Newman, an Australian business veteran who has served in a range of public roles including chair of the ASX, the ABC and the Prime Minister’s Business Advisory Council. He tore into the Treasurer’s large-spending agenda.
“Australians wait for someone to expose the emperors who have no clothes. Sadly, Treasurer Jim Chalmers is one such emperor,” Mr Newman said.
“Dr Chalmers promotes Chinese-style socialism under the banner ‘stakeholder capitalism’.
“His mastery of spin uses the title ‘humanising capital’, but the philosophy is the same.”
Mr Newman attacked the Treasurer over an essay he penned in 2023, where Mr Chalmers slammed neoliberalism and called on business to co-invest with government.
“Dr. Chalmers believes that businesses should be judged on their corporate social responsibility, not just financial metrics,” the business veteran said.
“He advocates ‘the transformation of the welfare state into a managerial utopia with the government in collaboration with superannuation funds acting as benevolent resource allocators through which autocratic technocratic elites will manage all aspects of society’.
“What could possibly go wrong?”
Labor’s economic outlook was similarly ripped in to by former Productivity Commissioner Gary Banks who said the Albanese government’s “productivity agenda is mainly a spending more agenda”.
He pointed to large spending on the NDIS, renewable energy and manufacturing subsidies as detriments to productivity and living standards.
“The diversion of resources to the public sector has been a major contributor to the decline in productivity growth in Australia,” Mr Banks said.
“Most parts of the public sector not only have lower productivity but they have inherently slower productivity growth.
“This reflects not just the greater labour intensity of the services concerned but weaker incentives to use resources in a cost-effective way and to pursue cost reducing innovations.”
Alongside the criticisms of Labor’s economic agenda, the experts at the Sky News roundtable also laid out four actions the government needs to take to restore productivity in the economy.
These were scrapping bracket creep, cutting government spending by four per cent, curbing new NDIS entrants and ditching net-zero emissions targets.