Shallow Budget plan damages Bill Shorten

Bill Shorten showed some guts this week but his good work was undone by a silly misjudgment where he couldn’t afford it: on the economy, writes Laurie Oakes.

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THIS was the week that was supposed to bolster Labor’s economic management credentials, but the plan backfired because of a silly misjudgment.

The attempt to present a glossy and shallow PR pamphlet as a 10-year plan for Australia’s economy was greeted with almost universal scorn.

The lack of detail in the lightweight document about how a Labor government would tackle Budget repair enabled Bill Shorten’s critics to portray him as a leader not serious about matters economic.

Labor gave the impression of trying to spin its way out of a damaging admission — that, if Shorten wins the July 2 election, there will be bigger deficits over the next four years than under the Coalition.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and Treasurer Scott Morrison quickly and skilfully applied pressure.

As a result, when Shorten yesterday produced a Budget repair strategy with savings that included support for some measures Labor has previously blocked in the Senate, the government was able to claim he had been pushed into it.

The opposition leader Bill Shorten says he has more Budget savings to announce next week.. Picture: JASON EDWARDS

That undermined an exercise intended to show Shorten as a tough leader prepared to make unpopular decisions in the national interest.

Unpopular some of the decisions certainly will be, particularly those affecting Family Tax Benefits. And Shorten says he has more Budget savings to announce next week.

The next tranche of savings will need to be significant, though, to give credibility to Labor’s undertaking to “reduce the deficit every year and return the Budget to balance in the same year as the Liberals”. Turnbull called that a hallucination and this instalment certainly fell well short of what is necessary to do the job.

Of course, the Prime Minister and Treasurer are delighted that Labor is finally fighting on their ground.

There could be a downside for them, however, in that the discussion provides a reminder of Coalition dishonesty before the last election.

Tony Abbott’s approach was to deny the need for significant spending cuts right up to polling day, despite knowing he would have to wield the razor once in government.

Shorten would not have got away with that, but it was never part of his thinking anyway. He has shunned the “small target” strategy usually embraced by Oppositions.

Even the timing of the release of these savings announcements has been influenced by what Shorten and his advisers see as the timidity of previous Opposition leaders.

“Kim Beazley was all huggy through the 1998 campaign, putting off acknowledgment of Budget pressures until the last few days,” an ALP backroom operator said yesterday.

“Bill’s decided it’s better to have the fight three weeks out than three days out.”

Thought was given to announcing these savings measures earlier, given the eight-week campaign, but the Labor brains trust judged that voters would not begin to engage until the second half of the marathon.

Indications are they were right. Pollsters say people were just starting to tune in to the election when they were diverted by the recent freak weather.

They will start paying attention again fairly quickly, which means the campaign has reached a crucial stage.

Shorten is getting plenty of advice to the effect that he should try to stay away from the economy and focus on other issues, but shrugs it off.

Says an adviser: “Bill’s view is that if you want to be elected, you have to show you can run the economy. He doesn’t have a choice.”

So it will be the economy front and centre for the next three weeks.

The Liberals are preparing a barrage of negative ads to aim at Labor on the issue.

Turnbull and Morrison are in overdrive on their so-called economic plan.

Staffers at Coalition campaign HQ who protest that people are sick of constant repetition of the “growth and jobs” mantra after five weeks are quickly put in their place.

There will be more, not less, of the slogan, they are told. Punters are just starting to take notice.

Shorten should gain some credibility out of yesterday’s announcements. He might get points for honesty, even guts.

But the confusion earlier in the week probably meant that many voters registered nothing more than a couple of days of noise about Labor and the deficit.

And that made it a much better week for Turnbull than for Shorten.

Laurie Oakes is the Nine Network political editor

Originally published as Shallow Budget plan damages Bill Shorten