The Chalmers Curve

Now watch how the Chalmers law works.

Unemployment. The share of his releases mentioning it rose from five per cent in his first year to 29 per cent in 2025 when "unemployment remains low under Labor" was a release in its own right.

Unemployment was 3.5 per cent in his first full month and now it is 4.7 per cent. It has risen every month since June, and the number of times he mentions it has duly halved. The Chalmers curve and law in sequence.

Cost of living. In 2024 it was his busiest subject taking up 48 per cent of his releases.

Since then, the rate of mentions has halved, just as prices and mortgage rates turned back up. Real wages have now fallen, in annual terms, for three quarters running and are back roughly where they were in 2010. A worker on $90,000 is about $4,500 a year worse off than at the end of the pandemic, by the Australia Institute's count.

The surplus. In 2024, 15 per cent of his releases mentioned it, in 2025, 5 per cent, and 2026? Zero.

Two surpluses, delivered by iron ore prices and bracket creep, have given way to a $22 billion deficit last year and $31 billion forecast for this one with gross debt passing a trillion dollars.

Just like the budget surplus, the word is now gone from his media releases.

These are the results of the freshly discovered economic principles of the Chalmers curve into Chalmers law, and it is consistent throughout every economic marker a household can feel. He increasingly talks about an indicator. It gets worse. He stops talking about it and it gets even worse quietly.

The one word that has not yet fallen silent is productivity, which on the curve either means that the worst is still to come, or that the silence is booked for 2027.