Opinion: State Budget will make or break Labor Government

THERE’S little currently on the minority Labor administration’s legislative agenda and with an election expected in November, it doesn’t leave much time for the Government to better define its purpose.

Treasurer Curtis Pitt and Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk. The June 13 Budget will be make-or-break for the administration. Picture: Claudia Baxter

WITH just eight months likely left in the term, the Palaszczuk Government seems to be meandering rather than marauding towards the election.

At this point, most administrations attempt to lay down touchstone issues, giving them time to promote their policies and positions ad nauseam so they seep into the psyche of voters.

They also hunt around for opportunities to wedge their opponents, planting seeds of doubt about the alternative.

However, there’s little currently on the minority Labor administration’s legislative agenda apart from a bit of tinkering around with trading hour laws. And with an election expected in November, that leaves as little as eight sitting weeks left for the Government to use Parliament as a forum to better define its purpose.

There’s literally dozens of reviews still waiting to be acted upon. But many of these were exercises in duck shoving to begin with and will produce more hard decisions and political problems than opportunities.

After innovation fell out of favour, jobs have been the Government’s mantra for many months now.

Yet the latest figures show the Government is grappling with an unemployment rate worse than the one it inherited and the money they’ve thrown at programs such as “Back to Work” isn’t working.

If the Palaszczuk Government enjoyed popular support, then the pressure would be on the Opposition to come up with reasons for voters to alter their views. However, that’s not the case.

Labor’s vote has sunk from the 37.5 per cent at the 2015 election to 31 per cent in the latest Galaxy Poll, no way near what it needs to win in its own right. And Annastacia Palaszczuk’s position as preferred premier has begun to wane.

Palaszczuk and her ministers have invested much of their time furiously attacking the LNP in an effort to warn voters against the alternative. They’ve fanned the flames about the return of asset sales, tried to paint LNP Leader Tim Nicholls as Campbell Newman-lite and warned of the perils of a government in alliance with Pauline Hanson.

All these will be weapons in the Labor arsenal when the election is called.

In fact, it’s much the same as Labor’s last campaign except this time the LNP aren’t in office. One Nation is the new factor in this equation.

Labor hopes preference dealing with the far-Right party would turn voters off the LNP, particularly in inner-city areas. But the West Australian election showed such deals didn’t hurt the Liberal’s support but did drive voters away from One Nation.\

The missing pieces in the puzzle that the Palaszczuk Government has so far failed to find are the reasons voters should return it and return it with more MPs to pursue their agenda.

This is why Treasurer Curtis Pitt’s June 13 Budget will be make-or-break for the administration.

Pitt’s first two fiscal blueprints were coloured by raids on Government-owned corporations, superannuation and long-service leave reserves. If there’s a hollow log left Labor will find it. But it’s unlikely to be so lucrative.

And while the Government will parade an operating surplus far better than anything their predecessors produced, it really is just a Clayton’s result. The 2017-18 fiscal balance, which includes the books of Government-owned businesses, is forecast to be worse than what the LNP proposed. While the overall debt trajectory has eased, Labor’s borrowing bill will still be worse than what it inherited.

A fat operating surplus figure may allow Labor to laud its own economic management. But it comes at the expense of infrastructure spending which remains well below the average for the previous decade as a share of the Queensland economy.

This strips the state of the necessary stimulus to create jobs and, importantly, denies Palaszczuk and her MPs opportunities to wear hard hats at the beginning of vote-winning projects.

Unless Labor can produce a game changer, it may spend the next eight months just dawdling its way towards defeat.

Steven Wardill is The Courier-Mail’s state affairs editor