Federal Budget 2017: Treasurer Scott Morrison delivers his first Labor budget

OPINION: It raises taxes, invests in skills and training and increases spending in social welfare areas. Treasurer Scott Morrison’s second Federal Budget smells suspiciously like ALP spirit.

• What the Budget means for you
• Editorial: Calculated to blunt Labor’s attack
• Queensland: Blow to state’s biggest project

TREASURER Scott Morrison has just handed down his first Labor budget.

This is a budget that raises taxes, invests in skills and training, and increases spending in key social welfare areas such as education, health, and disability funding.

Gone are the apocalyptic warnings about debt and deficit disasters and “budget emergency”. Instead we have “good debt and bad debt”.

Gone is the divisive rhetoric about “lifters and leaners”, and in its place we have Mr Morrison conceding it has been a long time since hardworking Australians had a decent pay rise and this was putting “real pressure” on families.

Gone too is the focus on carving spending back to the bone, to be replaced with the long overdue recognition that Australia also has an entrenched revenue problem.

This has seen a Coalition government — which while in opposition used to screech “great big new tax” at every available opportunity — commit to new revenue measures which will raise $17.4 billion over the next four years.

Top of the pops here is a 0.5 percentage point hike in the Medicare Levy to 2.5 per cent, with all of the money flowing through to a special fund used to pay for the National Disability Insurance Scheme. It is a clever move in that the NDIS has broad community support, and the core Australian nature of a fair go would see fairly broad community acceptance.

Next up is a $6.2 billion slug on the big five banks (Macquarie being the fifth), which is pretty much the Turnbull Government equivalent of Labor’s now dead Mining Super Profits Tax — except that it is likely to raise more money in the immediate term.

While the banks will undoubtedly put up one hell of a fight here, and argue that this new impost will have to be passed on to customers via higher fees and interest rates, ultimately the Federal Government is likely to have public opinion on its side given the low regard in which the banking sector is held generally.

Still, can you just imagine the political wailing and flapping of gums had Labor been brazen enough to craft such a tax ambush on the banks?

Likewise, had this actually been a Labor budget, imagine the attack lines about them “taxing employment and small business” by levying employers who bring in foreign workers (budget gain $1.2 billion).

But it’s not actually a Labor budget, it just smells like one — and all said and done it does indeed make some of the right choices for the times.

Originally published as Federal Budget 2017: Treasurer Scott Morrison delivers his first Labor budget