Labor’s 10th budget is built to not be its last

Tuesday’s state budget will be Labor’s 10th since it returned to power in 2015 from a term in opposition.

Its first was described as “lacklustre”, offering “no money” to woo (or reward) voters. This one will be different.

Staring down another election in October, Labor is at pains to make a case to stay in charge.

Queensland Treasurer Cameron Dick will hand down his fifth state budget on Tuesday – Steven Miles’ first as premier.Credit: Matt Dennien

The party has already launched TV and online ads spruiking its laundry list of cost-easing measures – with plenty of money for voters – before the final budget is even released.

These measures are, almost exclusively, meant to lower the stretched living costs concerning most Queensland households.

The face of them is “new” Premier Steven Miles, who’s been racing to lift his profile and perception against Opposition Leader David Crisafulli before the election.

Rolled out on Sunday night and also featuring snippets of Miles’ family, the ads come almost exactly six months since his elevation to the Labor leadership amid souring polls.

Miles’ first budget, then, will also be the first his party has delivered without predecessor Annastacia Palaszczuk’s touch since 2015. He hasn’t shied from throwing in some bucket-list ideas, either.

We already know some detail of the “difficult” bits, as foreshadowed by Treasurer and Deputy Premier Cameron Dick (who will have now had his hands on half of Labor’s 10 budgets).

They include lower coal royalty revenue and federal GST funding set to push the state budget $3 billion into the red in the coming financial year, as cost-of-living and infrastructure spends lift.

Without that as a surprise on budget day, it will leave the government free to talk about what it wants to: its plans to help households, vision for the state, picking fights with multinational mining companies and foreign property investors, and the lack of much detail to date from the LNP.

More fuel was added to that latter “small target” fire when LNP leader David Crisafulli pledged last week to adopt most measures in the budget, sight-unseen. You could almost hear Dick’s speech being written (or rewritten) in real time.

While some of this heat came from Labor, it also came from the last LNP leader to be premier: Campbell Newman.

With Labor loathe to let Queenslanders forget his one-term government, and many former ministers still sitting in shadow cabinet more than a decade on, it was quickly seized on.

But, for the same reason, public criticism from Newman isn’t something some LNP folks are necessarily mad or worried about. And he does, ultimately, still want them to win.

Crisafulli and shadow treasurer David Janetzki will get their time to reply to Labor’s budget on Thursday, where they are expected to lay out some more detail of their campaign platform.

It will be a platform with one more Labor-sized bite out of it after Miles’ Sunday first-home stamp duty help expansion, teased but yet-to-be detailed by the LNP.

And with nothing but a (busy) budget week, estimates, and two more sitting weeks of parliament left on the political calendar between now and October 26 – that campaign is well and truly on.