Cygnet can read. If he could only count. Or think.

If you’re wondering where Australian economic policy is heading, don’t look at Treasury forecasts. Look at Jim Chalmers’ bookshelf. The man doesn’t so much chart a course for the nation as he does rifle through his reading list and asks, “What would this book do?”

We are, quite literally, being governed by a book club.

First, it was Mariana Mazzucato’s high-church statism. A seductive gospel for a Treasurer who believes in big government and thinks government intervention is just market failure in reverse. Chalmers devoured her central planning fan-fiction like a kid with a giant bag of Maltesers. Next thing you know, we got essays masquerading as economic manifestos, positioning Treasury as the brainstem of Australia’s economy. Values based capital? More like Soviet Five-Year Plans.

Now, with Abundance by Ezra Klein tucked under his arm like a self-help book, Chalmers is having another epiphany. Suddenly, it’s all about "dynamism" and "capacity constraints" and "investing in abundance" which sounds suspiciously like Keynesianism after a TED Talk and a pumpkin latte.

While Abundance dresses itself up as a call to slash red tape and unleash progress in housing, climate, and infrastructure, it’s really a glossy brochure for old-school central planning. Just with better PR.

By pitching government as a “bottleneck detective” and waving off market-based solutions, the authors champion a technocratic fantasy where the state gets to pick its favourite sectors, bulldoze dissent, and call it streamlining.

The result? Selective deregulation that clears the runway for pet projects like renewables and subsidised housing, while everyone else is still tangled in red tape.

It's less about liberating the economy and more about tightening the grip. Just with a friendlier face and a productivity buzzword or two.

But is this really how economic policy is now done in Canberra? Based on the last book read by the Treasurer.

Let’s not pretend this is a new Chalmers feature. This is a man marinated in the Swan Doctrine™—a creed that taught us “deficits don’t matter unless the Liberals are in power.” Chalmers, ever the loyal apprentice, took Swan’s “spend now, explain later” strategy and upgraded it with footnotes from whatever longform economics thinkpiece his staff wrote for him.

It may have even been Chalmers who wrote this article for then Treasurer Wayne Swan quoting Thomas Piketty, also known as Karl Marx without the beard.

It would be funny if it weren’t so consequential. Australia's economy is lurching under the weight of structural deficits, a housing crisis, inflation, and productivity flatter than a Queensland road. Meanwhile, the Treasurer is off mainlining pop economics and mistaking it for a plan. What’s next? Implementing tax reform based on a Freakonomics chapter? Infrastructure priorities by Malcolm Gladwell?

Chalmers isn’t an economist. He’s a political scientist with a Treasury portfolio. His fiscal strategy is less “responsible stewardship” and more “A Ouija board of progressive wishful thinking.” We’re being governed not by data, not by doctrine, but by whatever resonated last Sunday afternoon between sips lattes.

Australia deserves a Treasurer who doesn’t think “policy” means cherry-picking the most progressive paragraph from whatever bestseller is hot on ABC Radio National. Instead, we’ve got one who sees economic stewardship as an identity crisis to be solved by reading lists.

Jim, buddy, read less. Think more.