Liberals pick fights with the wealthy and powerful in State Budget 2018

FROM medical specialists to the public sector union to cronies of the former government, Treasurer Rob Lucas has shown he is prepared to antagonise some powerful people in the new Liberal Government’s first Budget.

• Five-minute guide: Everything you need to know about the Budget
• Analysis: This Budget has teeth — can the Libs sell it?
• Around our city: What the Budget means for your area
• Seven TAFEs to close — but funds flow in to education

MEDICAL specialists, public sector unions and, particularly, the former Labor regime are in Treasurer Rob Lucas’s firing line as he clinically upends more than 16 years of established orders.

Having waited since 2001 to deliver a Liberal Budget, Mr Lucas has not pulled his punches. But he argues these “difficult decisions” have been delivered with the interests of fairness for taxpayers at their heart.

Accusing former Labor treasurer Tom Koutsantonis of deception over the Budget position, Mr Lucas produced Treasury memos from January and March detailing blowouts bordering on $200 million.

This is squarely aimed at knocking out Labor claims the state’s finances were left in a healthy position and politically wounding Opposition Leader Peter Malinauskas, treasury spokesman Stephen Mullighan and Mr Koutsantonis.

Repeatedly describing the health system as haemorrhaging cash, Mr Lucas argues this financial drain is worst in the Central Adelaide Local Health Network, which has the new Royal Adelaide Hospital as its centrepiece.

This has overspent $250 million in the past financial year and, in his Budget speech, Mr Lucas said this comes after deficits ranging between $58 million and $146 million in the past four years.

“It is clear now urgent corrective action will need to be taken,” he said.

State Budgets are always a tug of war between competing interests — but by targeting wealthy medical specialists for more money, the Marshall Government has picked a fight with a group that traditionally would be seen as Liberal Party supporters.

Clinicians employed in public hospitals will be bristling as Mr Lucas zeroes in on them for savings. He has laid bare their lucrative salary arrangements — 290 salaried medical officers earned more than $500,000 last financial year and two more than $1 million.

Mr Lucas’s double-barrelled attack on these cosy conditions, which Labor late last year talked behind the scenes about outing and tackling, will put the medical officers’ union on the back foot. It faces an uphill battle to counter the argument that clinicians have unusually generous rights to generate income through treating private patients in public health facilities.

This is despite that union having been the Liberals’ erstwhile ally in targeting the former Labor government over plans for the now-complete Royal Adelaide Hospital.

Mr Lucas is keenly aware, yet substantially unconcerned, by picking a fight with the Public Service Association and other unions over the outsourcing of the Adelaide Remand Centre and potential outsourcing of pathology, radiology and other services.

Anticipating a furore, his Budget presentation to the media includes an answer to a pre-election question from the PSA on outsourcing, in which the Liberals argue they have “responsibility to consider such options where it is clearly in the public interest to do so”.

This goes to the heart of Mr Lucas’s Budget and the established orders it attacks. He risks offending even his own side by contrasting his Budget with, say, the 2014 federal Coalition Budget delivered by Joe Hockey. Unlike that Budget’s breach of election promises not to cut education, health or the ABC, Mr Lucas argues, his document does “not use the discovery of the extent of Labor’s financial mess as an excuse” to break promises.

Rob Lucas has taken the axe to many pet projects of the former Labor government. Picture: Kelly Barnes/The Australian.

This is not intended as a sexy Budget, one that rivals the Royal Adelaide Show for thrills and excitement. Mr Lucas wants it to be viewed akin to “a business suit with sensible shoes”.

His self-described mission is to “clean up Labor’s financial mess, keep our election promises and establish a strong foundation for our state’s future”.

In his final term of 40 years in state politics, Mr Lucas has willingly bought into a range of fights across numerous fronts as he seeks to achieve this mission. He has put many sectors on the back foot, armed with evidence gathered from finally having his hands on the state’s financial levers.

This Budget is the first chapter in his final political story. Mr Lucas clearly is ready for the fights to write a history he argues is in the state’s best interests.