When it comes to the usual fare of toting up the winners and losers in the budget, the column on the right has opposition leader Anthony Albanese high on it, probably in poll position.
Anthony Albanese is the beer and cigs of the budget – not up as was the case almost interminably through the 1980s and 90s, but out of sight and almost out of mind.
Much of the discussion in media today includes the not entirely fanciful notion that Treasurer Josh Frydenberg’s third budget could easily come from the shelves of a Labor government.
The budget pours money into social services ranging from aged care to mental health.
Among the key measures is $1.1 billion for women’s safety, including $261.4 million over two years in co-operation with the states and territories to improve frontline family, domestic and sexual violence services.
The Morrison government also announced a $17.7 billion five-year package in response to the Aged Care Royal Commission’s report on appalling abuse and neglect in the system.
The spending figure on aged care is a good seven billion a year off what the Royal Commission had recommended in terms of enhanced services to the elderly in care or receiving home care packages. It is too little, too late and disgraces within Australia’s aged system of the shocking kind outlined in the Royal Commission are likely to continue.
Therein lies some opportunity for Anthony Albanese but where it might be exploited, it falls into policy nuance, is difficult to market and harder still to catch the imagination of the electorate.
The Coalition debt and deficit mantra was so often repeated in politics a decade ago that one wondered if Coalition MPs had it tattooed on their left wrists as a physical cheat sheet, lest they forget the precise wording mid-presser.
Who among us cannot recall the tormented Coalition wail of grandchildren burdened with debt, and their grandchildren, and their grandchildren’s grandchildren and their grandchildren’s granchildren’s — well … we all remember. Who could forget the dismal guilt-evoking warble that at some stage Australians in decades and centuries to come would have to hit the shylocks to pay off Labor’s deficit spending it had racked up in its brief period in power this century?
Debt and deficit now embraced
That incantation has fallen into silence now, a cynical political prop now casually discarded.
On the right of politics, debt and deficit is now embraced, cuddled, even loved. The light touch of a shrinking government has been replaced by Shiatsu massage for all with the cost of the rub down and the scented candles put on the credit card.
There is no budget surplus “foreseeable within the next decade”, according to the Prime Minister on Nine’s Today show on Wednesday morning, “because of the significant investments we’ve had to take”.
Imagine that rhetoric a decade ago and the subsequent hue and cry from the then Coalition opposition.
We live in weird and unusual times. In the present, in a pandemic ravaged world with the global economy going backwards, this is a budget that aspires to the previously near-impossible ambition of being both responsible and politically popular.
Monetary policy is on vacation. Fiscal policy must drive the Australian economy into growth and on the budget’s projections, that growth will be running at four per cent next year, creating jobs and powering small business. Or will it? It won’t really matter to the Morrison government because by then there will have been an election and on the basis of this budget alone, it should win it and I suspect, win it comfortably.
Morrison’s MVP
In the immediate political aftermath, Josh Frydenberg’s third budget puts him pride of place on the Coalition’s run-on team. The MVP and BOG in the Morrison side.
There is no doubt now that Frydenberg is the Morrison Government’s best player and the one most likely to succeed Morrison when that time comes.
He’s a Victorian and a potential fillip to the party’s state branch which languishes devoid of dynamic leadership. Frydenberg is close to Michael Kroger and National Right faction powerbroker Michael Sukkar. He leads what is strangely called the Victorian “ambition faction” after he walloped his mate, Health Minister Greg Hunt, in the contest for the deputy Liberal leadership in 2018.
The big question is how does Labor respond? Does it roll out the debt trucks and place them prominently on the shoulders of our highways and byways? Probably not.
Albanese will have his Budget-in-Reply on Thursday evening, broadcast to the sort of ratings that might give Great British Railway Journeys a run for its money on SBS but not much else.
We can expect to hear much about wages policy, or at least wages which are going backwards in this country and have been for some time. The problem is well known. Fixing it is another thing. Albanese might well pick away at aged care spending, as he should.
But overall, he has been snookered. In spending offerings, he can’t go lower and going higher will only evoke suspicion.
I suspect much of his speech will go to trust in the government, an oration based on a Shorten-like feast of punning that the Morrison government is big on announcements but short on delivery. This might make for amusing television briefly but is really only playing to the Labor base. TV remote controls may get a brief hammering until screens settle on roaming glens and Turner’s leaden skies somewhere on a train in Cheshire.
Politics, as in life, is all about timing and Albanese finds himself as Opposition leader in a time where governments – state and federal – are deeply admired for what is broadly called pandemic management. It’s a hard job and Josh Frydenberg’s third budget just made it a whole lot harder.
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