Former ABC economics guru who didn't know diff b/w revenue & profit now advising on tax reform.
Sunday, 24 April 2022
Here's a reminder of Ms Alberici's economic credentials from The Master, Joe Aston at the AFR.
In this binary dystopia we all now inhabit, either the ABC's chief economics correspondent Emma Alberici is a noble martyr (though nobody's sacked her, let alone killed her) of Liberal/National hostility to the public broadcaster, and their calculated degradation of it; or a leftist actor abusing her taxpayer-funded platform to crusade for regime change. One – the one you hold – is right, the other is wrong.
Ours is a Third Way (bearing little resemblance to Tony Blair's): that Alberici's majestic self-importance is inversely proportionate to her aptitude. Such a pathos has to catch you up.
And her incapacity for grace in professional failure goes some way to explaining the Right's pile-on, even when it became a little silly. Her lowly arts degree (in Italian) precludes her from valid membership of the tax punditry? Er, Paul Keating didn't finish high school. Anybody whose enlightenment begins and ends with undergraduate studies (as we're sure her's didn't) shouldn't be allowed a driver's license let alone a microphone.
Having conflated revenue with profit, Emma Alberici has now shown she doesn't know what a surplus is.
But in their outraged defence of a fellow traveller, The New Daily (who else would employ Quentin Dempster?), New Matilda and friends wilfully absolved Alberici of, for someone in her position, a humiliating misunderstanding of elementary accounting – the difference between revenue and profit.
Defiantly, Alberici touted her "25 years' experience in the fields of business and finance reporting" and that once she was nominated for a Walkley (quite possibly the most pitiful boast we've ever heard), then lawyered up, claiming to have been "thrown under a bus". Yeah right – she's driving the damn bus! And here's a tip for you: Dennis Hopper didn't plant the bomb on this one.
Because, McCain, she's done it again! This time, Alberici's utter non-comprehension of public sector accounting is laid bare in three unwitting confessions in her studio interview with Labor's finance spokesman Jim Chalmers after Tuesday's Budget.
"[Shadow Treasurer] Chris Bowen on the weekend told my colleague Barrie Cassidy that you want to run higher surpluses than the Government. How much higher than the Government and what would you do with that money?"
Wearing that unmistakable WTF expression on his dial, Chalmers was careful to evade her illogical query.
Undeterred, Alberici pressed again. "And what will you do with those surpluses?" A second time, Chalmers dissembled.
A third time, the cock crowed (this really was as inevitable as the betrayal of Jesus by St Peter). "Sorry, no, you said you would run higher surpluses, so what happens to that money?”
Hanged by her own persistence. Chalmers, at this point, put her out of her blissful ignorance – or at least tried! "Surpluses go towards paying down debt."
Bingo. C'est magnifique! Hey, we majored in French. After 25 years in business and finance reporting, Alberici apparently thinks a budget surplus is an account with actual money in it, not a figure reached by deducting the Commonwealth's expenditure from its revenue.
You can't spend a surplus (though, as Chalmers points out, one ultimately reduces debt on the balance sheet), for f***'s sake, or it wouldn't be a surplus, would it? Spending, astonishingly, goes on the expenditure line and is then collectively half of the sum that is the surplus/deficit.
What a prize idiot. She reminds us of the opening line to Ben Folds' The Luckiest:
"I don't get many things right the first time; in fact I am told that a lot."
How will Dempster and Ben Oquist and Wayne Swan (there's the living case against free education right there; surely he majored in Italian?) explain away this one as a Business Council conspiracy, or a verbaling by the plutocracy? Oh, they'll find a way.
And what will Aunty chief Michelle Guthrie and her news director Gaven Morris do about the now overwhelming evidence that their chief economics correspondent can't read a corporate or government income statement or balance sheet? Nothing, probably. As you were.