Andrew Bolt: Frydenberg’s fistful of dollars in election budget

What we’ve just got from Treasurer Josh Frydenberg is a fistful of dollars in a budget just two months before an election.

There ought to be a law that says a government can’t give us a budget just two months before an election.

That’s because you get exactly what we’ve just got from Treasurer Josh Frydenberg. A fistful of dollars.

Or, more correctly, a fistful of petrol discount vouchers and a vote-for-me $250 cheque in the mail for pensioners, stamped “Cost of Living Payment”. Plus extra tax offsets worth $3000 for couples on low and middle incomes.

I know, Frydenberg hasn’t gone completely Santa Claus. In fact, he’s shown superhuman restraint.

But the bottom line is that the government does not dare take away all the lollies – sorry, the stimulus spending – it lavished on us when the pandemic hit, even with the economy now roaring back and inflation rising.

Put it this way. Next financial year the government will spend $4 for every $3 it spent in the financial year before the pandemic. But it will earn just $3.40 for every $3 it earned back then. And our net debt is soaring towards $1 trillion.

Josh Frydenberg has shown superhuman restraint in his budget. Picture: Gary Ramage

Still, what else could you expect? A government down 10 per cent in the polls would have to be filled with saints not to shovel out bribes just weeks before an election.

In fact, Frydenberg is acting from totally rational self-preservation by halving petrol excise for the next six months, saving motorists $11 every time they fill a 50-litre tank.

Have you seen petrol prices lately, thanks to the war in Ukraine? A weekend drive to the parents has become a luxury for the poor.

Voters would have given Frydenberg a Will Smith if he hadn’t tossed them a bone.

And with Prime Minister Scott Morrison set to call an election in just a few days, there was no time left to see if petrol prices would soon fall again, or to argue that the billions would be better spent on actually building something to make us safer in a world that’s suddenly much scarier.

We’ve seen this before. When the global financial crisis hit in 2008, China used the excuse to spend its stimulus dollars on a network of high-speed trains.

But in Australia back then, Labor’s stimulus cash splash went on new TVs, cheques to the dead, free insulation and overpriced school halls. So which country is stronger today?

Frydenberg has done nothing as bad, but our chronic short-termism led to a curious silence in his budget speech.

He started with this sombre warning: “Tonight, as we gather, war rages in Europe.”

And then, after promising “greater self-reliance” … next to nothing.

True, the government has previously announced it will build a new submarine base in NSW or Queensland for the nuclear submarines it hasn’t even ordered. True, it will gradually increase the size of our army over 10 years. And, yes, it is building a domestic factory for making vaccines.

The government does not dare take away all the stimulus spending even with the economy roaring back. Picture: Jake Nowakowski

But is that it? Hello? What about more money for urgently building our own missiles? More money to build or save vital industries in case our foreign supplies are cut off – petrol refineries, fertiliser factories, even semiconductors?

But no. That’s all too long term.

That said, there was one tremendous thing in the budget. A moral thing. A healthy thing for Australia. And a total fluke that the Liberals are going to throw away. Labor, too.

Frydenberg boasted, rightly, that Australian now has the lowest unemployment rate in 48 years, just 4 per cent, and it’s still falling.

This is wonderful. There is hardly anything more important a government can give its people than work.

Work means independence. It means money in people’s pockets that they actually earned themselves. It gives them pride, dreams and a bigger stake in their country’s future.

I’d even bet that with fewer idle hands, the crime rate will fall. What’s more, wages are now tipped to rise like they didn’t before the pandemic, as bosses fight for workers.

Fantastic, but little of this was actually planned by this government, even if its JobKeeper spending helped.

This great thing was basically caused by the pandemic. The virus forced us to close our borders, stopping the torrent of migrant workers who flooded our job markets while some 700,000 Australians sat at home, living off the dole.

Ending mass immigration means more Australians are now working than ever before.

Frydenberg should have owned this moment and declared Australia had finally learnt its lesson: mass immigration makes a country bigger but more crowded, and doesn’t make each person in it much richer.

Instead, buried in the budget papers we read that we’ll soon be back to this sugar-hit Ponzi scheme – importing 235,000 people, net, every year until our cities choke.

Sigh. The chances missed! But what more could Frydenberg do, as the Liberals sweat over Armageddon in May?