Budget 2022: Treasurer squibs it under Albanese’s small-target plan

Anthony Albanese listens to Treasurer Jim Chalmers in Question Time. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Gary Ramage

You only get one first budget, as Treasurer Jim Chalmers well knows. It’s supposed to be a defining statement of intent. But the Treasurer woke the morning after his night of nights with the electorate and commentariat universally underwhelmed with his performance.

This budget was always going to be the product of the small-target, win-at-all-costs election strategy and didn’t it show. Small-target opposition has become small-ambition government.

The suburban approach to the genuine economic storm we are about to weather simply lacks the maturity or courage of the response needed for these times. We are faced with an economic La Nina and we haven’t even started to fill the sand bags or batten down the yard.

The budget is full of doom and gloom and dire predictions. Chalmers made the case very well that Australia has hard times ahead and hard decisions to be made. So why wait? Why be the ticket agent still selling seats on the Disaster Express knowing it ends in a certain train wreck?

Telling us all how bad it’s going to be isn’t even half the job; that’s the opening scene-setter for leadership, for actually having the conversation Australia needs to have about the structural deficit we face.

I’ve known Jim since his young Labor days. He’s destined to be prime minister and hasn’t hidden his ambition that being Treasurer, like his old boss and mentor Wayne Swan, isn’t what he got into politics to do.

He has manifest destiny writ large, so why with the perfect opportunity to be a Jim Cairns, Paul Keating or even a Swan did he squib so badly the calls he knows we need to make?

He had spent weeks throwing caution to the wind and fanning the flames of the stage three tax cuts debate. Even to the point of some loose language from someone who shows such discipline and lack of impulsiveness.

The only explanation can be the hand of Albo. Anthony Albanese so desperately wants to hold that ephemeral Newspoll preferred PM lead that just being there seems a sufficient end in itself.

I feel for Chalmers as he’s shackled from being a true reformist by the dead weight of the small-targeters. The Weatherill/Emerson approach has rendered an impotent government. A government afraid to actually make the calls necessary on rampant energy prices and crippling cost-of-living pressures.

Labor is always a party of fighting the good fight and standing up for working families. What we saw in the budget instead was an insipid rebadging of Josh Frydenberg’s March budget.

Sure, Labor cancelled a few of Barnaby Joyce’s projects in regional areas to pay childcare for struggling couples with a combined income of $530,000 per annum, but this was largely just an update on the last Morrison budget.

We keep being told the world has changed, and it has. The war in Ukraine, China aggression in our region, domestic inflation off the leash and massive increases to mortgage interest rates are all putting huge pressure on the cost of living and our nation’s security.

Yet what we got was a stocktake. Groceries up. Interest rates up. Power bills up a whopping 56 per cent. Real wages going backwards and stagnant defence spending.

It was more a commentary than a conversation from the Treasurer and that’s why people are scratching their heads and asking why a bloke with so much intellect, raw talent and ambition did so little when he got his first chance to show some leadership.

Albanese has already had his name etched in gold as Prime Minister. A lifetime of chasing his dream now sees him reclining in the easy chair on the porch with Toto, a voice referendum the only other thing on his to-do list for this term of office, it would seem.

Chalmers, though, needs to show his caucus colleagues what sort of PM he will be by making the big calls, by showing courage under pressure. Albo has already caught the proverbial car, Jim is still in the race and shouldn’t be hobbled by the say-nothing, do-nothing brigade who are still backslapping the recent win rather than realising the next election will be won or lost on the decisions taken now in government.

Labor is best when it’s reforming and leading change. That’s our party’s heritage and our future. We aren’t elected to simply mark time and put the rubbish out on Tuesday nights.

Yet when we had the chance to actually start making a difference, to look after families under extraordinary pressure, and with things only going to get worse, we did nothing to ease the cost of living. We predicted the worst and then sat on our hands.

Labor is now an elected government and though it’s critical to keep your election commitments, it’s also just as important to have the courage to lead when working families need it most.

The next opportunity is now in May 2023 with Dr Chalmers’ second budget. Let’s hope that families and working people don’t pay too high a price for inaction on this one and that the hard times and hard decisions are made with a great deal more courage than what we witnessed on Tuesday night.