Life on the West Island - Let them eat cake

Michele Bullock, Governor of the West Island’s Reserve Bank, has provoked animated discussion after she claimed that despite the cost of living spiral, families and households across the nation had built up large savings buffers and are doing just fine. Bullock went on to describe inflation as increasingly home-grown and demand-driven…and driven by domestic demand is that it is increasingly underpinned by services. Hairdressers and dentists, dining out, sporting and other recreational activities — the prices of all these services are rising strongly.

The Governor seems unaware of the effects of the interest rate rises she has championed and her advocacy that unemployment must rise and wage rates fall to rein in inflation, which are having devastating consequences for many West Islanders as they promote inequality and widen the gap between rich and poor.

Bullock’s comments have produced a flood of negative commentary. Following is a very small sample of sardonic responses from incredulous mainstream media readers. (All of these commenters gave their real names, which have been omitted below.)

• I agree with RBA governor Michele Bullock and have decreed that in my house from here on we shall not dine out. We will repair broken shoes with surplus plastics and rubbers collected at bulk rubbish collection days and we will cut each other’s hair. The bedroom door handle shall be the precision tool to be used for tooth extractions. In fact, we should stop sending kids to school as well so we can all be as blissfully ignorant as she. Seriously, how do people like this clown get to command the two-track lever on interest rates and ruin people’s lives?
• I note that tickets to attend Bullock’s Australian Business Economists dinner address cost $250 for members and $275 for non-members. Isn’t that a teensy bit inflationary — especially if you had to get your hair done beforehand?
• Finally someone has had the courage to really identify one of the key drivers of inflation: frivolous dentistry. Now that Bullock has spoken, hopefully people will stop making impulsive dental appointments and perhaps consider do-it-yourself dentistry kits. Until now they haven’t been selling particularly well, although they recently overtook second-hand nose flutes in popularity.
• A bit more than a century and a half or so, back when anaesthetics were invented, the upper classes of England thought it best that the lower classes should not be allowed to access any pain control for, say, amputations of limbs, childbirth or dental work. The poor simply did not feel pain in the same way that the more sensitive upper class experienced it, and anyway, pain should be the lot of the poor, as God intended. Come 2023 and Bullock has shown us how far we have come.
• Anyone in leadership who would make such a comment either in jest or earnestly is out of touch and it does not bode well for the office of governor or leadership in general. People are doing it tough. I paid for an elderly woman’s groceries recently — she didn’t have enough money for the cashier. She certainly didn’t look as though she’d stepped out of the hairdresser or the dentist. Oh, I know! She must have a cat as the groceries included cat food. But on second thought, I wonder if that was for a cat…
• I’d like to thank Bullock for sharing her insights with us, the great unwashed. On that note, I wonder why she didn’t include soap? Perhaps an underlying belief that the general populace doesn’t use it?
• I have been harbouring at least three teeth that, while not having decay, are a little fractured or broken as the result of old age. It’s refreshing to know that my negligence in getting my teeth repaired (primarily because I can’t afford it) is contributing to the economic well-being of the country and that I’m doing my bit to fight inflation. Let’s face it. The economic plight of the nation and the culprits involved in our instability are clearly the clients of orthodontists. I would suggest that this is already known by the Reserve Bank and that it is, as we speak, developing a strategy that will ensure all those kids with straight teeth in private schools will soon have a mouthful of raggedy pegs just like the kids in public schools.
• According to a recent Grattan Institute report, 16% of Australians can’t afford to go to the dentist when they need to. A third of us have untreated tooth decay. Well done to Bullock for realising that our inflation problem is home-grown. But there’s nothing “increasingly” about it — it’s been home-grown since Australian companies began using the cover of imported inflation to jack up prices and increase profit margins. Not that Bullock wants to accept this — that’s why she added “demand-driven”. Inflation must always be the fault of ordinary households, not businesses.
• Now that I am looking at ways to balance my budget with a view to having sufficient funds to live not totally impecuniously to an old age, I have to agree that it is a dire choice of what one does with one’s hair and teeth. Before I retired, and believing I had sufficient funds to be able to look after myself in my later years, I did possibly overspend on stylish hairdressers. It was an ego thing, I would think. Now I am reduced to the “cheap choppers”, as I unkindly refer to them. A short haircut costs only $20 and after a week it looks snappy to me!

There were dozens of similar comments from West Islanders who are struggling with living costs, expressing despair and amazement that the Reserve Bank Governor is so out of touch with ordinary people, or perhaps even worse, running a protection racket for the rich and the profit-gouging corporations who are the real drivers of inflation. Like Marie Antoinette, perhaps she is advising that the poor should give up bread and just eat cake?