This Budget tells us about Malcolm Turnbull is really about

MALCOLM Turnbull almost lost the last election because voters didn’t know what he stood for. This Budget told us a heck of a lot more about him.

This Budget shows what Malcolm Turnbull really stands for. Picture: Kym Smith

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THE Budget asks us to believe that a Government roughly $600 billion in the hole is actually heading for a surplus in 2021 — which would be the first in 14 years.

But it also asks much more from voters, and that is its key.

Forget agile and innovation. The Turnbull government is now about security and health, having learned from the electoral rebuke of last year.

And it’s about doing big things of concrete and steel which create jobs and economic growth and become projects of national pride.

It is saluting the working not-so-rich over the really rich and the bone idle. The proposal to drug test welfare beneficiaries is more about standing up for hard workers who pay their own way than saving money.

That’s the core of the Budget. It is broadly a reaction to the national political mood. It portrays a government looking after basics and doing things which require imagination and action and ensuring hard workers are rewarded.

The Budget core also requires the Liberal Party to reshape some of its principles.

From one perspective it is bank bashing and hunting down transnationals for unpaid taxes, big kicks against big business.

But it is also about making an iron clad commitment to Medicare and the National Disability Insurance Scheme — and daring Labor to oppose the measures.

The Liberal thumping of last election — and its near defeat — was because voters doubted the Government’s qualifications on health, and had little idea what Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull was on about.

This Budget tells them clearly what Turnbull is about in 2017.

And there was sugar coating of the near future from Treasurer Scott Morrison’s assurances that happy economic times, complete with wage rises above the inflation rate, are at hand.

The Budget will have its critics, including some Liberals who remain wedded to some of the 21 “zombie measures” from 2014 and 2015 finally dispatched in this Budget.

And Labor will question the accounting which approach which effectively says borrowing for infrastructure isn’t really debt.

But there will be that killer Mr Morrison dare to the Opposition: Hands up if you don’t want to pay to care for the disabled.