What the 2024/2025 state budget REALLY means for Queensland

It’s a high-spending budget featuring many winners, a few losers and some heavy ammunition for government MPs, writes Hayden Johnson.

This isn’t your typical pre-election budget, but it should do enough to re-energise Labor’s lifeless troops.

It’s a high-spending budget featuring many winners, a few losers and some heavy ammunition for government MPs in their electorates.

The test will be whether voters listen.

Governments – especially those in power for nine years – rarely get a budget bounce in the polls.

More often, they’re happy to take the benefits without offering credit.

However, Mr Dick’s fifth budget contains far more sweeteners than the first four.

Under the theme of urgent cost of living relief, the state government is borrowing to spend bigand convince voters Labor deserves a fourth term – 13 years in office.

It is the last major hope before the election campaign to turn the tide, with polling right now putting Premier Steven Miles’s electoral chances in the same basket as Anna Bligh.

Former Queensland premier Anna Bligh. Picture: Josh O’Reilly.

It’s unlikely Labor will be almost wiped out come October 26, but the government desperately needs Queenslanders to re-engage with its agenda.

Budgets don’t often deliver that.

In June 2011, Ms Bligh’s state budget was positioned as the “architecture for recovery” from January’s deadly floods.

While it dripped of patriotic rhetoric, her budget did nothing to recover the government’s collapsing support after 13 years in power.

This government has been slowly opening the budget papers for the past five weeks with major announcements such as 50c fares, stamp duty changes and a vehicle registration cut far too large to dump together on one day.

It’s been designed to deliver weeks of good news, set and agenda and turn the heat back on the conspicuously quiet Opposition Leader David Crisafulli.

The slow release of the budget has been designed to turn the heat on leader of the Opposition David Crisafulli. Picture: Liam Kidston

After sitting next to Annastacia Palaszczuk for three-and-a-half years, Mr Miles is now turning his back on her government and their inaction that led to housing, crime, health and cost of living challenges.

He told morning radio: “The issues might not be new, but I’m new”.

Later, Mr Dick clearly urged Queenslanders to forget the figures of the past – except Campbell Newman, presumably.

While some Labor MPs appear reserved to their fate in October, others are optimistic in Mr Miles’s ability to turn it around.

One said, despite the grim outlook, people still aren’t “crossing the street” to avoid Labor like they did in 2012.

Worryingly for Labor, however, is this was the kind of optimism shared on the booths of Ipswich West in March just days before and 18 per cent swing delivered a convincing with to the LNP.

Mr Dick has laid the groundwork for political battles in 93 electorates to begin.