Test now lies in the Newman sales pitch

TIM Nicholls has delivered a budget full of big calls and needing a big sell.

With no sweeteners and little in the way of reform, it is defined by a projected return to surplus and asset fire sale that will frame the debate going into the next election.

For Nicholls and Premier Campbell Newman there is still a risk it could blow up in their faces.

Newman is no longer the “can-do’’ salesman who led the Liberal National Party to the biggest electoral win in Australian history just two years ago. With a poll due by early next year, the pugnacious Premier’s popularity has dived — with the latest Newspoll showing a 10 percentage point swing to Labor that would oust Newman, but maybe not the LNP, from government. This is a leader who has managed to lose political skin in the suburbs by cracking down on ­bikies.

But if Newman can’t impress on a seemingly populist law-and-order issue, how can he sell the idea of grand-scale privatisation?

Newman and Nicholls hope it will be voters’ memories of Labor and its legacy of debt.

The starting point is the projected 2016-17 surplus. Its promise is critical in vindicating the pain of the past two years from “fixing Labor’s mess’’.

But just as a 2014-15 deficit of $664 million, forecast in December, blew out to $2.2 billion by the time yesterday’s budget papers were printed, the projected surplus, built on LNG exports and a rebound in coal prices, could look shaky before the election if commodity prices keep falling.

That will be when Newman will ask voters to trust him on the asset sales. No doubt he will sweeten the proposal with voters’ goodies by dipping into the 25 per cent of the sale proceeds not going to pay off debt.

The plan to raise $33bn through the sale, lease or private investment in the state’s ports and power assets is hardly a walk-up vote winner. Just ask the Bligh government, which was punished after selling off rail, forestry and ports just weeks after its surprise 2009 election win , albeit without a word of warning. Newman learnt that lesson and flagged the possibility of asset sales through Peter Costello’s commission of audit as early as 2012.

He will not only have to win over voters, but convince the market to buy or invest — with the big-ticket “poles and wires’’ only open for investment in return for a share of profits.

Newman was recruited from city hall to sell the LNP to an electorate angry at Labor, but nervous about the alternative.

He now has to do it again.