Queensland’s bottom line is a Band-Aid budget

Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk and Treasurer Jackie Trad (right) speak during the state government's 2019-20 Queensland budget media briefing. Picture: Glenn Hunt/AAP

ANALYSIS

Queensland Treasurer Jackie Trad has today delivered a Band-Aid budget.

It has done little to address the serious systemic challenges that face the state’s bottom line: a skyrocketing debt bill, sluggish economic growth, a ballooning bureaucracy and rampant government spending.

Yes, the government has announced a new ‘Service Priority Review Office’ which will find public service cuts of $200m next financial year, and half-a-billion-dollars in cuts every year after that.

But there will be no forced redundancies. And Trad says voluntary redundancies are “not our intention”.

This comes as Queensland’s bureaucracy continues to expand. The public service wage bill is expected to jump by $1.3bn to $25.4bn in 2019-20, 5.4 per cent higher than last year.

Trad tied herself in knots today, insisting she is still trying to cut the state’s debt — which is now forecast to surpass $90bn in four years.

But here’s the kicker, there is no debt reduction anywhere in the budget papers. The helpful bureaucrats from Treasury confirmed as much.

In fact, there’s not been any attempts at debt reduction in Queensland since the first-term of the Palaszczuk government, when Treasurer Curtis Pitt attempted some clever accounting to shuffle the debt. First, he shifted debt onto the books of the state’s government-owned corporations, and then he raided the surplus of the public servants’ defined benefits super fund.

This year, Trad has a new accounting principle, that has meant the staggering true cost of the state’s total borrowings are hidden down the back of the budget papers.

Next year, the state budget will fall a few months before Queenslanders go to the polls.

You can be sure the hard decisions that the budget is crying out for won’t be taken then.

A Band-Aid only works on superficial cuts but today’s budget suggests Queensland’s economic problems are much deeper.