Excuse me for having a memory for history but when I hear the Greens encouraging the nation’s Treasurer Jim Chalmers to cancel the Reserve Bank if it raises interest rates next month, it made me think about how the legendary radio personality John Laws described the Greens when they became a federal political party in the 1990s.

Laws described them as “watermelons: green on the outside, red on the in!” And looking at the party’s recent list of demands, the Greens have been making this left-leaning mob looks a tad more like the communists of the Russian Revolution!

Led by Adam Bandt, who has progressively lurched more to the left in recent years, he has Treasury spokesman Senator Nick McKim, who made his name recently threatening to send Woolworth’s CEO Brad Banducci to jail for not answering a question on the company’s return on equity!

But wait, there’s more and The Australian’s Joe Kelly has today reported on the list of leftist demands the Greens’ economics hitman has put on the Government. And remember, the PM and Jim Chalmers rely on these guys to get legislation passed. Here’s Nick’s list:

1. He wants the Treasurer to overturn a rate rise decision from the RBA, if it happens in August.
2. He wants the Government to give up on its Budget Surplus.
3. He wants the Productivity Commission to evaluate the privatisation policies of the past 50 years, started by Labor legends Bob Hawke and Paul Keating.
4. He wants a “corporate super profits tax” to reduce demand and inflation.
5. He would bump up JobSeeker and other income support payments from government.
6. He wouldn’t support cuts to the National Disability Insurance Scheme.

Interestingly, McKim apparently has section 11 of the Reserve Bank Act on his side. This says that the Treasurer can “override decisions made by the board of the RBA, including decisions on interest rates”!

This is what McKim said to Joe Kelly: “The mechanics of section 11 are that the treasurer can advise … the governor-general that is, to issue an order to the RBA board. And the RBA board has to comply with that order. Dr Chalmers … should be making it very clear to the RBA that he is prepared to use section 11 to overrule them if necessary”.

While that might be legally true, if Dr Chalmers took Nick’s advice, then this is what would happen:

1. The dollar would be dumped by overseas players, making imports dearer and pushing up inflation.
2. Overseas lenders would be afraid to lend to us and would see us as a potential “banana republic”, as Paul Keating once inferred could happen here in a radio interview with John Laws, when unions were opposing his proposed economic reforms. After that reference, the dollar fell under 50 US cents!
3. Labor would be smashed at the next election!

Nick McKim is driven by a leftist goal to ‘take from the richer to give to the poorer’, which many Robin Hood fans would support. But this isn’t England in the year 1160! But in a globally interdependent economy, where we’re small in population and big borrowers of the savings of other countries, we are expected to play ball like other sensible capitalist economies.

If we start overriding central banks and imposing excessive taxes on successful businesses and people, the economic consequences of ‘nice’ ideas could come back to bite the very people Nick McKim wants to help.

As the dad in the movie The Castle would say of Nick’s goals: “Tell him, his dreamin’!