Paul Starick | Real reason South Australia relegated to the fringes in federal budget

We might have a popular premier strutting the national stage, but South Australia has missed out in a budget laying foundations for a looming federal election, writes Paul Starick.

Not even Premier Peter Malinauskas could lure an extraordinary amount of cash from Treasurer Jim Chalmers. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Morgan Sette

The pulling power of Premier Peter Malinauskas might have drawn the spotlight to the state but it hasn’t lured an extraordinary amount of cash from Treasurer Jim Chalmers.

Beyond the $101.8m to train welders, graduates and other skilled workers for the Adelaide-based nuclear-powered submarine construction, there’s comparatively little earmarked for SA.

Middle-class families will happily pocket the $300 energy bill handout but this will barely supplement household budgets being hammered by cost-of-living hits to mortgages, insurance, groceries, petrol and so on.

Not so long ago, SA was an electoral battleground, with five marginal federal seats that guaranteed top-level attention and funding. The state helped underpin John Howard’s 11-year reign until 2007.

The world's biggest hydrogen production facility, power plant and storage is being planned for Whyalla.

In this budget, the big-ticket items are $100m for a South Eastern Freeway upgrade, plus another $120m for Mount Barker and Verdun interchange upgrades.

Billions being ploughed into hydrogen might help out one of state Labor’s pet projects, the $593m hydrogen power plant to be built at Whyalla.

But the overwhelming sense from this budget is of pie-in-the-sky promises that will require a significant degree of good fortune to realise.

Worse still, Mr Chalmers is risking another interest rate rise, as many economists have warned, by throwing around cash in a desperate bid to relieve living costs ahead of an election expected within a year.

“The number one priority of this government and this budget is helping Australians with the cost of living,” Mr Chalmers said in his speech.

The premier at the opening of the Whyalla office of hydrogen power plant in February. Picture: Ben Clark

Treasurer Jim Chalmers. Picture: Tracey Nearmy/Getty Images

Responsible economic management, including to “help fight inflation”, was ranked fifth in Mr Chalmers’ list of priorities.

There are some lofty goals for a budget “framed in fraught and fragile global conditions” with dwindling economic growth forecast.

It’s hard to believe this budget will make a substantial difference to national crises in home supply, power prices and living costs, along with the escalating strategic threat posed by China’s unprecedented military build-up.

Yet Mr Chalmers seems ambitious on these fronts and, going even further, argues his budget is positioning Australia to be a “renewable energy superpower” by “investing in a future made in Australia”.

He trumpets “a new economy and a new generation of prosperity” as Australians become “the primary beneficiaries of a world of churn and change”.

This sounds more like a magic pudding fairytale than reality. It’s a story that Mr Chalmers hopes will be enough to convince voters in his home state of Queensland, a real electoral battleground, to keep Labor in power.