Tony Abbott promised that the adults would take charge again in Canberra. But it’s hard to find anyone who thinks that’s happened.

Yesterday the ABC published a piece from the usually even handed commentator David Llewellyn-Smith that sums things up pretty well.

He describes the confusion:

… the Abbott Government’s recent performance can … be interpreted as politicised, populist, nationalist, socialist, neo-conservative, realist, fiscally responsible and irresponsible, reformist, random, honest and mendacious, all at once.

That just about covers it!

Then he describes the central problem:

The vortex [of policy confusion] is stirred by one overriding truth: the Australian economy is under intense competitive strain. Australian businesses in tradeable sectors like Qantas and Graincorp will continue to fail as our cost base is now too high to sustain our standards of living. Tensions within the Budget will keep rising as the nation moves beyond the mining boom and the terms of trade fall further. Climate change will steadily ratchet up pressure on both companies and reform-directed public spending and the demographic challenges recently outlined by the RBA and Treasury will pinch everything a little more each year.

So far the Government has acknowledged very little of this. Mostly it has done the opposite, endorsing the old economic growth model of rising house prices and wealth effects as the path to prosperity. It plans to support this with public investment in infrastructure which appears rushed rather than productivity-focused. These two approaches make the underlying problem of a bloated real exchange rate worse.

It’s pretty clear the Governor of the Reserve Bank would agree. Allowing for strangely muted language of central bankers, he has made it abundantly clear that the exchange rate is too high, and that the exuberance in rising house prices is of serious concern. (It’s these two issues that place the RBA on the horns of an impossible dilemma I’ve written about elsewhere.)

Meanwhile, whilst boats are being stopped, house prices are rising, and electricity bill reductions are promised, vast numbers of voters remain deluded that all is well.

The chaos and delusion will continue until someone credible is adult enough to stand up and start telling the voters the truth about what’s ahead.

Who will that be?

Malcolm?