A farmer looking at a field has choices.
He can plant wheat, he can plant corn, or he may even divide the field and plant some of each.
What he cannot do is plant both across the whole field and promise two full harvests.
By contrast, the crop of politicians we now have are increasingly asking us to believe that they can deliver such an outcome.
Political rhetoric resembles agricultural catalogues written by people who have never had mud on their boots. Every party promises more services, lower taxes, cheaper essentials, generous subsidies, and protection from almost every unpleasant consequence of economic reality.
No major party owns this temptation. They all know that promising the harvest wins more votes than explaining the limits of the field. Luckily, there are a few individuals who call out the illusion, and present an alternative outcome.
Strategy requires choice.
A farmer chooses wheat for a mixture of quantitative and qualitative reasons. He considers soil moisture, seed prices, fertiliser costs, available machinery, and a forecast of the expected price at harvest.
He also applies judgement built through years of experience. The numbers inform the choice, shape probabilities, identify risks, and the possible impact of factors out of his control, but the farmer must make the final choice. They are also accountable for the outcomes, as they generally stick around for the long haul, rather than wandering off to a sinecure offered by a vested interest.
A serious national strategy faces the same problem.
Governments must choose among defence, health, education, infrastructure, energy, housing, welfare, tax relief, and debt reduction. Every choice consumes money, labour, capital, and political attention that cannot then go somewhere else.
However, politicians never campaign on the opportunity cost. It seems that recognising that a dollar spent on ‘A’ is a dollar that cannot be spent on ‘B’ unless it is borrowed is now politically toxic. Before Covid, there was vigorous attention paid to the budget deficit, it had become a political football. Since Covid, that attention has disappeared as if the debt undertaken to fund current consumption has no impact on the ability to grow the economy in order to fund future consumption.
They promise wheat and corn from the same field, then increase the promised harvest by borrowing against future seasons, and that extra field they claim to have planted.
Government borrowing to fund immediate consumption at the expense of productive assets incurs the obligation to pay interest.
Every kid in school learns about the impact of compounding, while not necessarily understanding the maths. Politicians chasing votes today ignore the reality of compounding, compromising future ability to deliver what they are promising.
Future taxpayers inherit the obligation to service the debt. They also inherit fewer choices because interest payments consume revenue before a future government considers a school, hospital, road, or tax cut.
Australia has not yet wandered into a sovereign debt crisis. The Parliamentary Budget Office judges the long-term position sustainable under its central assumptions and notes that Australia carries less debt relative to GDP than many comparable economies.
That reassurance seems fragile to me, and deserves the acknowledgement that they are knowingly incurring a debt that must be paid, at some point. Being less screwed than the other bloke should not be a safety blanket.
The Parliamentary Budget Office forecasts national public debt interest payments rising from $54.2 billion in 2026–27 to $77.2 billion in 2029–30. It identifies interest as one of the fastest-growing areas of government spending. Each new deficit adds to the field already claimed by previous promises.
Borrowing can make excellent sense when it funds productive infrastructure, capability or reform that expands future output. By contrast borrowing to finance current consumption, conceal trade-offs or purchase temporary political affection offers a different proposition. The electorate gets the lolly today, but their kids get the dental bill.
Meanwhile, our political conversation routinely loses sight of the forces that expand the field.
Productivity, investment, skills, functioning markets, reliable energy, infrastructure, and competent institutions drive long-term prosperity. They determine how much value Australians can produce and retain from the resources available.
Australia’s labour productivity fell 0.6 per cent in the March quarter of 2026 and grew just 0.3 per cent over the year. Hours worked grew faster than output. That represents the economic equivalent of working the tractor longer while harvesting almost no additional wheat.
The political rewards for fixing this problem arrive slowly, too slowly for the current crop of pollies to publicly acknowledge.
The costs arrive immediately. Reform creates visible losers, uncertain benefits, and angry television interviews. A subsidy creates a grateful recipient before the evening news. Every person with children understands it is easy to give something, even of the response is muted. However, taking it away is a different usually noisy, emotional, and seemingly massive matter of importance.
Our political structures have trained voters to focus on the next payment, rebate, or concession. Politicians then point to that behaviour as justification for offering more of the same. The transaction has become brutally simple: vote for us now and trust us to manage the consequences later.
Trust once helped bridge the gap between immediate sacrifice and future benefit. Recent experience has weakened if not yet destroyed that bridge.
Pandemics, wars, commodity shocks, inflation, and interest-rate changes have demonstrated how quickly events outside government control can demolish confident forecasts. Political failures have also shown that sometimes the electorate placed its trust badly.
None of this makes strategy less necessary. It makes honest strategy more important.
A government cannot guarantee the weather. It can choose what to plant, explain why, acknowledge what it must leave unplanted and invest in the things that improve the probability of a worthwhile harvest.
That would require politicians to treat voters as adults. It also requires that voters trust them to behave like adults, and to be focussed on the outcomes for their kids, rather than the trappings of the immediate.
Neither outcome seems probable at this point.
