Dear Jim,

Can I call you that? It’s intended as a sign of deep concern, which seems fitting given the purpose of this letter. I know most people will now call you Treasurer. Perhaps you were called James by your parents when you were young and had misbehaved. But let me stick with Jim.

I know you have worked hard to get to where you are now. Years of working the party system, successive appointments as a ministerial advisor – Pete (Beattie), Kim (Beazley), Morris (Iemma), Wayne (Swan) – preselection for a safe Labor seat, shadow ministries and then the big job as Treasurer of Australia. Of course, you have never worked in business or run a business and that may have its drawbacks.

The reason I am writing to you, Jim, is to alert you to the foolishness of penning your tedious and wordy piece for lefty magazine, the Monthly, and what follows from this error. Let’s face it, you are no polemicist. You can hardly compare yourself to George Orwell, Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins to name some recent examples.

Presumably, the objective of your decision to spend the time on drafting up 6,000 words – I’m assuming here that you didn’t resort to ChatGPT, although some of the paragraphs are so replete with meaningless buzzwords that it makes me wonder – was to impress us all. Like the speakers on Hyde Park corner, your message was to denounce the current system and to claim to know the way to a better world.

Of course, your Labor mates, Kevin and Wayne, tried exactly the same thing in the same magazine. I’m not sure it worked out well for either of them; it was perhaps a pity you didn’t learn that lesson before wasting all that time – time that could have been spent actually being the Treasurer.

Here’s another tip: inventing new words is never a good idea. What’s with this whole ‘polycrisis’? Did you need this word to connote the seriousness of your task which you hilariously claim to involve reinventing capitalism to be ‘values-based’. Whose values, Jim – your values; my values, Twiggy Forrester’s values; the values of the coalminer in Queensland? For a university-educated bloke, this sort of language is alarmingly imprecise.

My guess is that you have never read the work of that outstanding American academic economist, Thomas Sowell. He’s the one who wrote the famous quote that ‘the first lesson of economics is scarcity. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.’ Even that one might resonate with you, Jim, or not.

Sowell has helpfully defined a crisis as ‘some situation exists, whose negative aspects the anointed (that’s you, Jim) propose to eliminate. Such a situation is routinely characterised as a “crisis”, even though all human situations have negative aspects, and even though evidence is seldom asked or given to show how the situation at hand is either uniquely bad or threatening to get worse.’ Of course, you have gone one better than Sowell – you have eagerly helped yourself to Klaus Schwab’s concept of a polycrisis!

Talking about academic economists, what possessed you to refer favourably to Mariana Mazzucato, former economic adviser to far-left former Labour leader in the UK, Jeremy Corbyn? No respectable economist has any time for her evidence-free writing. But here’s the scary bit, Jim: some of her work looks extremely similar to your output in the Monthly.

I’ll give you some examples. According to MM: ‘to solve the massive crises facing us, we must be innovative – we must use collaborative, mission-oriented thinking while also bringing a stakeholder view of public-private partnerships which means not only taking risks together but also sharing the rewards.’ Some similar buzzwords there, Jim.

Indeed, one of her books was called Rethinking Capitalism: Economics and Policy for Sustainable and Inclusive Growth.  Another was The Entrepreunerial State: Debunking public vs private sector myths.  Of course, we all know what happened to Corbyn: his madcap lefty ideas were too much even for the British voters and he is leader no more.

I understand, Jim, you might have been disappointed by the thrust of the reaction to your turgid piece. (Don’t worry, most people didn’t read the piece in its entirety, relying instead on the excerpts you kindly consented to have published in the Fin.) But here’s the thing: bursting into print again – this time in the Fin – was a big mistake. As Ron (Reagan) so aptly put it: ‘if you’re explaining, you’re losing.’

And what’s with the invective? ‘The predictable hyperventilating from the usual suspects, and the quiet encouragement from surprising places (crony capitalists come on down), has reinforced [my] beliefs.’ Clearly, you were hurt, Jim, claiming that you had been ‘wrongly caricatured, deliberately ignored or completely missed.’ Didums will be the most common reaction.

But I can see how you were offended by the editorial in the Fin. Gosh, that paper is normally all on board the climate action/the evils of business train. Something went very wrong when the leader writer could be so critical – dismissive even – of your penetrating insights.

But take this paragraph from your treatise: ‘By strengthening our institutions and our capacity, with a focus on the intersection of prosperity and wellbeing, on evidence, in place and community, collaboration and cooperation. By reimagining and redesigning markets – seeking value and impact, strengthening safeguards and guardrails in areas of unchecked risk. And with coordination and co-investment: recognising that government, business, philanthropic and investor interests and objectives are increasingly aligned and intertwined.’

Jim, do you think you could have squeezed any more buzzwords into this one ungrammatical paragraph? I guess when you are channeling Mariana, it’s easy for the meaningless words to just flow. Of course, a prior question is: what the hell does this mumbo-jumbo even mean?

My strongest piece of advice for you is to put the pen away, forget all that guff about reinventing capitalism – what, from the Treasury building in Canberra? – and get on with the real task of being in charge of the nation’s finances.

In point of fact, Jim, you have become our chief money man at a great time, with commodity prices at historic highs, a tight labour market and bracket creep combining to create a torrent of revenue and bolstering the budget bottom line. Your main job now is to ensure this unusual set of circumstances is not frittered away on unwise and ineffective spending.

Yours very sincerely,

Judith (aka a usual supect)