Picture the scene. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is in his situation room. He is minutes away from giving the green light to bomb Iranian targets. An adviser puts a diplomatic cable into his hands. It’s from the Israeli delegation at the IMF and World Bank annual meetings.

It reports that Jim Chalmers, the Australian Treasurer, has told the assembled ministers that an ‘escalation in the Middle East risks more persistent inflation for the global middle class’ (repeated in his op-ed, ‘Building economic buffers crucial in an unstable world’, the Australian, 26 October).

Netanyahu glances at the cable. He mutters an epithet about Chalmers in Hebrew. And returning to the business at hand, he orders that the bombing mission commence.

Of course, this scene never took place. But as we know, at the annual meetings Chalmers said just this. He implied that Israel should cease its fight for survival to, as the Australian put it last week, help him in his CPI war.

This is outrageous and morally bankrupt gaslighting. A new low, even for Chalmers.

It is akin to Bob Menzies urging Britain to sue for peace with Nazi Germany after the latter had defeated France in 1940 so that Australian mortgage rates don’t rise.

By now, voters are well aware of the catalogue of excuses, evasions and intellectual fallacies that Chalmers resorts to whenever the uncomfortable topic of Australia’s persistently high inflation comes up.

Recently, he even pointed the finger at the Morrison government’s spending during Covid, omitting to add that, at the time, he criticised them for spending too little, not too much.

And then there is his scapegoating of our supermarkets; his emotive claim that doing anything about inflation (like moderating government spending) would ‘smash’ the economy; and his pretence, in common with Steven Miles, that putting more money in people’s pockets (through cost-of-living relief) brings down, rather than exacerbates, inflationary pressures.

How do we explain this behaviour? Is it ignorance, dishonestly or wishful thinking? It may be all of these, but above all it represents a fatal character flaw for any political leader: a failure to take responsibility.

That responsibility should be Chalmers’ psychological blind spot is ironic, given that Chalmers constantly pats himself on the back for ‘responsible’ economic management.

But this is a cruel joke. The one thing – indeed, the only thing – he points to as evidence of this are the two surpluses that have occurred on his watch. Yet these were the result, not of anything that Chalmers has done, but bracket creep caused by, you guessed it, inflation.

(Bracket creep occurs when, as a result of inflation-adjusted wage increases, people move into, or further into, higher tax brackets. Canberra gets more money, but people’s real disposable incomes go down).

Max Weber, the brilliant German thinker, wrote extensively about politicians who were incapable of taking responsibility for their actions.

In his famous 1919 essay, Politics as a Vocation, Weber argued that politicians can be guided by what he called ‘the ethics of intention’ or ‘the ethics of responsibility’.

The former seek to make the world a better place, but take no interest in what consequences their policies, in fact, produce. The latter, in contrast, accept the world as it actually is and take responsibility for the results they achieve – or fail to.

Weber, in fact, argued that politicians must have both qualities. They must have passion and idealism, but also judgment and realism. Above all, they must be willing to own the real-world consequences of the policies they pursue.

Chalmers is clearly incapable of anything beyond good intentions. His goal and priority has always been to lock in our pandemic-era employment gains, relegating the fight against inflation to a secondary consideration. His Treasury Secretary, Steven Kennedy – who as we know also votes on interest rates on the RBA board – has always publicly backed this strategy.

These are the riding instructions Chalmers has given the Reserve Bank, which has been happy to keep our cash rate far lower than those of our international peers (all of whom took theirs over 5 per cent, with ours topping out at 4.35 per cent).

And it has underpinned Chalmers’ approach to fiscal policy, where bracket creep has been offset by the rapid growth in Commonwealth and state government spending.

With Australia now a developed economy outlier on inflation, and with our peer economies now cutting their official interest rates, Chalmers – and the RBA’s – economic gamble has clearly failed to pay off.

In underlying terms, as the latest data indicate, our inflation rate is still far too high, at 3.5 per cent over the year to September. Services inflation, which reflects wage costs, is significantly higher.

While private sector demand is undoubtedly weakening, so is supply, leaving us in a state of full-employment stagflation, with living standards falling by the day.

Someone should tell Chalmers that this is not a soft landing, as he incorrectly continues to claim, but an already-grounded economy slowing to an ignominious halt.

If Chalmers was actuated by the ethic of responsibility, he would admit to his failure on inflation and take ownership of it. He would accept that public spending is growing too fast, announce a preparedness to moderate his own spending plans, and call on the states to do the same. This would also be smart politics.

But no, leopards do not change their spots. We know by now that when he is faced with a difficult choice, Chalmers always choses the soft option.

His true inspiration is not Paul Keating, who as treasurer always championed smaller government and sound economic policy, but Steven Miles, who desperately and cravenly tried to spend his way to an election victory.

As Weber famously observed, ‘politics is a matter of boring down strongly and slowly through hard boards with passion and judgment together’. In his view, those who can’t face up to this truth are ‘windbags’ who ‘are simply intoxicating themselves’ with their own rhetoric (‘romantic sensations’, in Weber’s words).

This judgment not only applies to Jim Chalmers, but also to his boss Anthony Albanese – as the events of this week show.

But while Albanese’s political fortunes are waning by the day, Chalmers’s leadership ambitions, remarkably, remain intact.

With the inflation millstone still hanging around the government’s neck – and Chalmers offering no more than empty commentary and excuses – I daresay that more than a few of his colleagues are starting to question his credentials in this regard.