Jim Chalmers and Philip Lowe are hurting everyday Australians

Reserve Bank governor Philip Lowe seems to be doing everything he possibly can to act as a lightning rod for rising anger. He's displaying a remarkable inability to meet public perceptions that's rapidly taking truly superlative proportions.

The latest revelation - that he ditched his normal initial public appearance for the year at the National Press Club - for, instead, a private lunch with traders from the big four banks serves as just another demonstration of his bumbling incapacity to understand what the community expects.

Yet even this contempt for procedure was apparently not enough of a blunder for the gnomes of Martin Place. It was rapidly exacerbated as the Bank insisted to the Financial Review the exclusive briefing represented "an opportunity to listen to other people".

The sort of people the governor likes 'hearing' from is revealed in the choice of upmarket restaurant he spoke at. He could have heard ordinary Australia's frustration quite clearly at the Press Club but instead preferred to curl up in a cocoon of privilege, isolated from the real voices of young, overstretched home-buyers. Public anger focused on Lowe, but the government can't rely on him running interference for it forever.

When my father was working at the Reserve Bank he insisted its job wasn't to make long-term economic prognostications because they would always be wrong. He was absolutely correct. Far better, instead, to keep silent. Attempting to prognosticate the future is a job best left to fortune-tellers. What hubris to think you can predict with certainty a month ahead, let alone a year.

Today we correctly direct our opprobrium at Lowe while he keeps tugging at interest rates. This is, of course, the only lever he has and so of course, like a monkey, he keeps jumps up to seize it.

But the government can't rely on him running interference for it forever and, at some point, the public will realise the real problem isn't one the central bank can solve. It's not Lowe's fault that while he's urgently attempting to turn off the flow of money at the spigot, the government's pushing money out the door just as fast as it can. It's a repeat of the 1990s, when another a young dynamic treasurer played a staring role.

In the late '80s it was Paul Keating who told people not to worry, everything will be fine, nobody will get hurt, until suddenly, an authoritative backflip. He strode into a press conference to confidently and shamelessly announce "this is the recession we had to have", as if to say, "see, it was all planned".

Today we have another keen Treasurer, happy to prattle on in The Monthly about some sort of wonderful (and mythical) compact with business taking on the nurturing, social role of government. Unfortunately Jim Chalmers seems much better at conjuring up these sorts of big ideas than he is at actually managing a joined-up response to the economic problems facing the nation. Last week he said Treasury's expectation was "higher interest rates, combined with difficult global conditions, will slow our economy considerably". So great news, it will be a soft landing after all!

Excuse my scepticism. We're lurching towards a crisis, again, as the different parts of government work against one another, squashing the hopes and dreams of ordinary people as they attempt to get by.

Today a typical 25-year mortgage-holder is paying almost $1000 more to the bank each month than when rates began rising. A shortage of housing is entrenching a rental crisis throughout the country. At the same time universities are doing all they can to find foreign students and the government is boosting immigration to its highest level ever.

The fact this compounds the housing crisis is irrelevant. This, in turn, results in fertility declining as young couples focus on paying off their homes rather than having children. The next step is predictable. Demographic concern ("who will look after our ageing population?") and the creation of a spiral without end. Meanwhile the government will point to headline growth numbers and continue pretending this is all somehow sustainable as our CO2 emissions rise. It just doesn't make sense. This will, inevitably, further add to anti-immigrant sentiment despite the wonderful diversity such immigration brings.

Stand back and you can see the real problem is every institution is going at it hard, searching for the best result for their members. This means nobody is looking at the big picture or the flow-on effect elsewhere. Last week doctors spoke at the Press Club lectern Lowe baulked at. Their message was of yet another crisis, this time in front-line healthcare. They insist the old model (in this case the thin and fragile structure representing primary health care) is broken and presented data to back their claims.

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An overworked, ageing workforce finding it increasingly difficult to manage financially and provide the sort of holistic care neighbourhood GPs provided in the past. The College has a simple answer: fund the system properly. The trouble is that everybody needs more money and no amount of special pleading will ever get the government to raise taxes. The models of the past have to change.

Just as (excellent) local butchers closed down when the big supermarket chains moved in so, too, (great) local GPs will have to shut down as corporate medical centres begin providing the joined-up care neighbourhood doctors can't. Yes, getting personalised attention from a doctor who has time to listen is ideal but, like great childcare, nobody wants to pay the price to get it.

Our model of growth is coming apart at the seams as we lurch from crisis to crisis. We need a government that will deal with the root causes of the problem instead of gambling that somehow, a solution will just turn up.