State budgets: ugly to ultra-ugly

Queenslanders should take the money and run – straight to the ballot box in October, to throw out the incumbent Miles-Dick government.

Queensland Treasurer Cameron Dick.

Queenslanders should take the money and run – straight to the ballot box in October, to throw out the incumbent Miles-Dick government.

Any set of ministers who could be so irresponsible with their money, is not the crowd you would sensibly want to be in charge of those precious dollars, for a day longer.

Any set of ministers who could treat them as such out-and-out mugs, hoping to buy their votes with, again, their own money, you couldn’t possibly trust.

Any set of ministers who could demonstrate such basic and breathtakingly cynical stupidity, is one that all-but demands Queenslanders toss them out just for basic individual self-protection.

I’d never thought I’d ever write this, but Queensland’s fiscal obscenity, masquerading as a budget, makes Victoria’s look slightly - OK, ‘just slightly’ - less awful.

The sunshine state has come a long, long way - straight backward - from the days of absolute unbending and total bi-partisan commitment to fiscal rectitude and integrity, putting to shame all the other states. To borrow those famous words: Treasurer - that’s, Queensland’s state Treasurer, Cameron Dick, not the Queenslander who’s the national Treasurer - I knew former Labor Treasurer Keith De Lacy.

Treasurer, you are no Keith De Lacy. Were he still alive, De Lacy would be crying tears of blood at the wilful monstrosity that his Labor successor has imposed on the state and 5.5m Queenslanders.

They’ll be paying for the exploding debt, deep if not indeed forever into the future – just as Victorians will also, I should add. In the Queensland case, it’s a burden that will utterly exceed the one-off cash lollies being handed out to them, over the next few months, running down to the election. The Queensland profligacy is the national profligacy, also under Labor, and as noted, also under a Queenslander Treasurer, on a smaller scale. Queensland is spending money, and then some, of the loot it gets from coal and gas royalties - especially the coal where it has made them so punitive, forcing BHP to suspend investment in the state. In the same way Treasurer Chalmers has increased federal spending by more than $100bn a year, every year, in just two years - thanks to company tax paid on the booming profits from especially iron ore and coal exports.

Yet both governments, Federal and Queensland are also determined to shut down those industries; to reduce the taxes they pay (and the jobs and incomes) all to zero. Go figure. We get the NSW budget next week. Last year, NSW projected state debt to reach $185bn by 2026-27.

Queensland claims, optimistically, state borrowings will go to $111bn by 2027-28. While Victoria in its budget ’fessed up to net debt going past $188bn.

Now, I used to write – in the days of Keith De Lacy up north and the Cain-Kirner Labor Governments in the deep south – that the budgets running down the eastern seaboard were “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly”. Now I would write they run, “The Ugly, The Middling, and the, obviously still ‘Ultra-Ugly’. Then add on the federal debt and deficits. Enjoy the ever-escalating interest payments.