Federal Budget 2022: Treasurer Josh Frydenberg gives Coalition a shot at election win

Josh Frydenberg has done everything he can in this budget to give the Coalition the best chance it has of winning the next election.

It may not be enough, and it was always a big ask for a single budget to save a government, but the Treasurer has met the challenge of the deeply contradictory demands of spending enough money to ensure people believe the Coalition cares and addressing a dire decade of debt and deficit.

Frydenberg played up the magnitude of the task in the scheme of history: a once-in-a-century pandemic; the biggest economic shock since the Great Depression; devastating floods that have battered communities and, now; a war “raging” in Europe.

He also played up the extent of Australia’s economic recovery from recession: the largest and fastest improvement in the budget bottom line in 70 years; the four-year estimates are $100 billion better off than they were last year; the lowest unemployment in 48 years; the deficit to halve from $78bn in 2022-23 over the next three years and; the national debt to peak in 2026.

But golden comparisons with most of the rest of the developed world, no matter how valid, were not the stuff of a budget which would change the mind of people who the polls show are disillusioned and angry with the Coalition.

Nor was a huge cash splash going to bring back the Coalition’s lost legions of conservatives who wanted to see strict fiscal discipline, a turning away from the two years’ of hundreds of billions dollars in job support and debt and deficit reined in.

Frydenberg’s response has been to target working families, people in the middle of the cities, in the middle income bracket and in the middle of family life with an immediate $8bn relief package which will bring petrol under $2 a litre and inject immediate cash relief of $450 and $250 payments to households and concession card holders.

This is for the suburban heartland where families are doing it toughest with long commutes and rising food bills. It is also the home of the great undecided vote which doesn’t reside in the inner-city or regional Australia.

It is in the outer suburbs of Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, even the fringes of Perth, that the Coalition hopes to hold and even gain seats to offset the potential losses in South Australia and Western Australia. It is here that Frydenberg directed not only the cost-of-living relief but a swag of other family friendly incentives to help women’s jobs and training, extended paid parental leave for men, home deposit schemes and help with teenagers training and apprenticeships.

Of course, Barnaby Joyce and the Nationals have concentrated on reinforcing the Coalition’s advantage in the regions with massive infrastructure projects and industry support in mining and farming areas.

While trying to point to all this caring and sharing, Frydenberg is simultaneously appealing to those seeking fiscal discipline and an end of a “Labor-lite Liberal government” with his war cry that the spending measures are “responsible, targeted and temporary”.

Both tranches of Frydenberg's budget offerings will face a severe electorate test from those he has been trying to convince that they can have the best of both worlds in the current dire global circumstances.

If he convinces both audiences of the rectitude of his offerings he will be a winner and will have successfully targeted key groups of Coalition supporters who have become disaffected in the last two years. But that still doesn’t mean the budget will win the election. That is going to take much more in the short time available.