Peta Credlin: Reason why Morrison spent big in this year’s budget

The ‘Labor-style’ budget delivered last week proved one thing – Scott Morrison is focused on the next election and needs those votes he wouldn’t normally attract, writes Peta Credlin.

As last week’s budget made crystal clear, the Prime Minister is focused on winning the next election. As he should, because there’s no point being ideologically pure and finding yourself in opposition.

And as he must, because despite the Canberra consensus that Scott Morrison remains favourite, the brutal electoral arithmetic is against him. In a 151-seat House of Representatives, the Coalition has a majority of just one.

Sure, Craig Kelly’s seat of Hughes will probably come back to the Libs; and, with a candidate other than a factional hack, so might Tony Abbott’s old seat of Warringah.

But Nicolle Flint’s South Australian seat of Boothby will be vulnerable, especially with a new candidate; and despite healthy-looking margins, given Queensland’s electoral quirkiness, the National Party’s seats of Dawson and Flynn could be shaky with effective local members George Christensen and Ken O’Dowd retiring. And they won’t be the only ones; more Coalition members tipped to walk too.

Scott Morrison’s hopes to pick up some Labor voters with his big-spending budget. Picture: David Gray/Getty Images

The challenge for the Morrison government isn’t the polls, because I just don’t give them the weight they once had, but a series of boundary changes by the Australian Electoral Commission in a number of states.

A new safe Labor seat has been created in Victoria and the Liberals’ most marginal MP there, Gladys Liu in Chisolm, has just had her margin reduced to only 0.2 per cent or about 200 votes. In Western Australia, the safe-ish Liberal seat of Stirling has been abolished.

Alone, all else being equal, this is enough to wipe out the PM’s wafer-thin margin (and that’s before we factor in the recent statewide annihilation of the Liberals in WA and the impact that will have on federal campaigning).

With the task of successful political leaders being to hold their base and win over some of the middle ground, you can see why this budget so closely resembled a Labor one.

The PM is banking on some Labor voters rewarding him, not just for being a safe pair of hands during the pandemic but for being the kind of Liberal leader they can rely on to look after them with better-funded nursing homes, childcare and technical training, and a permanently higher dole.

Peta Credlin

I would have preferred the Budget to have been a more orthodox Liberal one, with conservative Labor voters, instead, won over by the government’s tougher approach to defence under Peter Dutton or a more robust approach to national self-respect via junking the ultra-woke national school curriculum, and taking on the imported “cancel culture” desperately trying to take root here.

Still, with wealthier people now more likely to vote green, and poorer people more likely to vote conservative, you can see what he’s trying to do: to assemble an Australian version of Donald Trump’s winning 2016 coalition or Boris Johnson’s “red wall” by being strongly patriotic and economically pragmatic: with more spending, not less, justified (pretty thinly, I should add) by a supposed ongoing need to stimulate our way out of the pandemic.

Just as in 2019, when outer-metropolitan and regional seats unexpectedly swung to the Coalition on the basis of Bill Shorten’s emissions obsession and punitive new taxes, the PM is hoping again to win over once-Labor voters by denying Labor the chance to campaign against austerity.

While the PM was reaching across the aisle to Labor voters, Anthony Albanese was trying to consolidate his base; and that he still needs to do this, is telling.

The fact Anthony Albanese needs to consolidate his base is telling for Labor, says Peta Credlin. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Gary Ramage

With little to criticise in the budget itself (at least from a big government perspective) the centrepiece of his reply speech was even more debt-fuelled spending, this time a $10 billion scheme to provide “social housing” to domestic violence victims, veterans and the so-called “heroes of the pandemic”, nurses, police and hospital cleaners with an average net cost to taxpayers of just over $330,000 per residence.

A Labor leader who feels the need to resort to market manipulation on such a grand scale is plainly nervous and insecure (and he should be, Shorten hasn’t gone away). He’s certainly played right into the PM’s hands by showing any wavering Liberal voters that, however spendthrift a Liberal government might be, Labor would be worse.

What struck me most last week is that the majority of the government’s tax revenue for next year is coming from ordinary income taxpayers, not big corporates. It’s readers like you doing the heavy-lifting, which is why what government spends your money on matters as much as it does.

The idea that we can keep borrowing up big because money is cheap is dangerous because “cheap” isn’t “free”; and no rates stay low forever.

What was missing was any real plan to get out of deficit earlier than 2032 and no plan on debt. While that’s what you might expect from Labor, I wanted the Coalition to do better. As taxpayers, we’re still paying welfare recipients carbon tax compensation eight years after the tax was scrapped because a gutless Senate blocked its removal; and you can bet that in 30 years the hangover from this pandemic will still be evident in our budget numbers too.

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