Budget 2016: Treasurer looks to the left to fix ALP’s mess

Scott Morrison has stolen Labor’s policies to pay for Labor’s legacies.

In a sleight of hand the Liberal Treasurer has adopted the ALP’s tax proposals on slugging the superannuation of high-income earners, charging cigarette smokers more and cracking down on multinational companies not paying tax.

Changing negative gearing is the only Labor tax proposal Morrison left like a shag on a rock so that he and Malcolm Turnbull could fling stones of fear at it over housing values in Sydney and Melbourne.

For his own account, Morrison has been content to deliver a “modest” budget that doesn’t even mention the size of personal income tax cuts and hope that, politically, voters will accept that “living within your means” means going without.

With little money, competing constituencies and an uncertain global outlook, Morrison has been forced to shuffle his limited means for maximum impact.

As a result he can simultaneously claim to be hitting the “big end of town” by adopting Labor’s policies, encouraging middle-income earners and small business to work more and create jobs and redistributing income from the richest to the poorest, particularly working women.

Of course, Labor can claim that the average wage earner “gets nothing” from this budget and practically all the benefits — including the removal of the Budget Deficit Levy and a weekly tax cut of $6 — go to those earning more than $80,000.

Morrison has attempted to assuage the economic rationalists and attack Labor by arguing that the spending cuts he made were real, if modest, and where possible were better targeted within the portfolio. Savings from cutting the carbon tax compensation for those going on to welfare as well as disability pensions are directly allocated to the looming black hole of the National Disability Insurance Scheme.

Without addressing the NDIS shortfall, which Labor falsely claimed was fully funded, Morrison’s budget would lack credibility and so hard-fought savings had to be absorbed.

Labor will be confronted by the choice of opposing welfare cuts or leaving the NDIS implementation at risk and betraying a Labor legacy.

As well, there is an additional $4 billion in school and hospital funding for the states that Morrison is supplying to head off Labor’s claims of health and education cuts from the 2014 budget. Ironically, Morrison is raising $4.7bn over four years from higher tobacco tax only a day after shooting down the ALP’s estimates using tobacco tax to pay for its Gonski education promises of the Gillard years.

As a Liberal treasurer, Morrison has risked his own constituency by hitting the richest through superannuation changes and global corporations with a tax crackdown but has offset these measures with a direct appeal to middle-income earners and small business.

For the Labor constituency, except for the restoration of a superannuation benefit for low-income earners that Tony Abbott abolished, there is little except perhaps for the funding of so many unfunded Labor legacies.

Morrison’s budget object is also to remind the electorate of Labor’s other legacies of debt and deficit that have left him in a position of only being able to point to improved trajectories for reducing debt and deficit over the years with no budget surplus on the horizon.

With so many competing interests and the pressure and demands of an election being called within days, there has never been a budget asked to deliver more and offered less.