James Campbell: Lack of cuts in Budget 2021 made reply tough for Anthony Albanese

For years the ALP’s budget-in-reply speech has contained a laundry list of perfidious Liberal cuts, but Budget 2021 put paid to that, writes James Campbell.

You have to feel a bit for the bloke who had the job of putting together Anthony Albanese’s speech in reply to Tuesday’s budget.

For the past seven years the tradition, which began under Bill Shorten, has been to pad out the time with a laundry list of perfidious Liberal cuts.

Somehow it even survived last October’s pandemic spend-a-thon, although to keep it going Albo was reduced to painting a horrifying picture of an Australia where the federal government no longer subsidises the wages of people working in the private sector.

It must have been a terrible disappointment back in March when the end of JobKeeper came and went without women and children being forced to queue at 1930s-style soup kitchens while men took to the bush to shoot rabbits for food.

Labor leader Anthony Albanese delivers his budget-in-reply speech. Picture: Sam Mooy/Getty Images

But the budget Josh Frydenberg handed down on Tuesday night would have been a disappointment.

No one I have spoken to since that evening has been able to recall a budget with fewer savings measures than the one that landed last week.

In a world where the only losers are migrants — read New Zealanders — forced to wait longer before being eligible for welfare, there was no choice for Labor but to retire the rhetoric around cuts.

Or at least dial it back to a few token references to “cut wages and conditions” for the fans.

Obviously this left quite a hole to fill.

The question was what could hope to take its place?

An obvious stop-gap would have been to attack the government for its failure to earmark any money for a federal quarantine facility.

That might have spoken to people who wonder if there might be something to the charge that Scott Morrison has left most of the heavy lifting in the pandemic to the states, a charge which, as an old Liberal operative of my acquaintance likes to say, has “the additional benefit of being true”.

But, for whatever reason, Albanese wasn’t interested.

Instead, the centrepiece of his budget-in-reply speech delivered on Thursday night was a pledge to spend $10 billion on something called the Housing Australia Future Fund.

This promises to build 20,000 new social housing properties, 4000 of which will be set aside for women and children fleeing domestic and family violence, and older women on low incomes who are at risk of homelessness.

It will also build 10,000 affordable homes for the heroes of the pandemic — frontline workers like police, nurses and cleaners who kept us safe.

There will also be $330 million for fixing up housing in remote Indigenous communities, adding more crisis and transitional housing for women and children fleeing domestic and family violence and older women at risk of homelessness, as well as housing and specialist services for veterans.

Nobody could disagree with that last list, it’s the first two pledges that interest me.

Providing “affordable” homes to frontline workers is, in theory, a lovely idea.

It’s when you get down into the details it gets more problematic because, while they might all be heroes, there is a big difference between the conditions of the cops and nurses — with their nice strong unions that make sure the government pays them plenty of overtime — and a migrant working for a cleaning contractor.

Maybe I’m a cynic, but something tells me that more of Albo’s “affordable” properties are going to end up in the hands of the former than the latter.

There were very few cuts in Treasurer Josh Frydenberg’s 2021-2022 Federal Budget. Picture: Sam Mooy/Getty Images

What about the “social housing”? Social housing, which presumably describes rent-subsidised homes owned by housing associations as well as public housing owned by the government, is appealing, I suppose.

But it is hard not to contrast the extent of Albanese’s ambitions for these people — permanent tenancy — with the government’s plan to help single parents buy their own homes when they have managed to save 2 per cent of the deposit.

This scheme, released in the budget, has copped a lot of flak from people who fear that encouraging people with so little saved to borrow money can only end in tears.

Which is fair enough, I suppose. If interest rates ever get back to “normal” levels a lot of people could indeed find themselves in a spot of bother.

But if it works it will give a lot of parents — more than 80 per cent of them mothers — a chance, indeed the only chance many of them will ever get, to own their own home.

And if we know anything, it is that buying a house is the best — and, indeed, for many people, the only — way of building up a little capital for themselves.

It is also one of the best ways to change someone’s voting behaviour, which is why back in the 1980s Margaret Thatcher practically gave away thousands of council houses to their tenants when she was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

Social housing is a double-headed coin for the ALP. It wins by keeping the tenants in a permanent dependent relationship with the state, which means they are overwhelmingly likely to vote Labor.

It also wins because in places like Victoria and Queensland, which increasingly resemble one-party states, it gets to decide where this housing goes.

Would you be shocked to learn — that in Melbourne, anyway — this housing seems to be concentrating itself in marginal Liberal seats or inner-city electorates at risk of defecting to the Greens Party?

So as a strategy in government, you could, I suppose, defend Albanese’s housing pitch.

But as a way of winning votes? Is there anyone likely to be impressed by this stuff who wasn’t already planning on voting Labor? In which case you have to ask yourself why is he being so defensive.

Originally published as James Campbell: Lack of cuts in Budget 2021 made reply tough for Anthony Albanese