Rob Lucas spent four decades preaching fiscal rectitude and the last 12 months acting like a crazed shopper in the Boxing Day sales.
His final budget as SA Treasurer was an eleventh-hour act of redemption, where the Liberal conservative finally got his budgetary house in order before he ends his career at next year’s state election.
Lucas, a political junkyard dog and one of the few commendable brawlers in the crushingly genteel SA Liberal Party, has devoted his career to smashing Labor’s mismanagement over everything from the 1991 State Bank collapse to its profligacy on over-budget projects such as the new Royal Adelaide Hospital and Adelaide Oval upgrade.
Through somewhat gritted teeth, Lucas was forced to tap into the socialist within last year with a Covid-inspired spending package worth $4 billion over two years.
But true to his tight-fisted roots, Lucas has now charted a path back to surplus, throwing in a few deliberate haymakers at the Labor states on his way towards the exit door.
In a rare step, he used his speech to name-check the Victorian and Queensland governments as examples of how not to govern in a crisis, saying tax hikes and open-ended deficits could not be excused even in the midst of a pandemic.
Lucas joked last year upon delivering his delayed state budget in November that he struggled philosophically with plunging SA into a $2.6 billion deficit, but that desperate times required desperate measures.
“Now I understand the joys of retail therapy,” he deadpanned at the time.
Lucas was back to his parsimonious best on Tuesday, saying the stimulus can’t go on forever and the surplus isn’t far away.
The political question is whether the SA voting public – in a state with more than its fair share of public servants – will mark up the Libs for fiscal rectitude or believe the tenor of the times can justify a continuing belief in the existence of a magic money tree.
Lucas’s last budget is predicated around the wholly accurate conviction that no such tree exists. For this, future generations of South Australian taxpayers owe him a debt of gratitude.
It remains to be seen whether there is enough in continuing outlays on services – especially whether there is enough new and creative spending on public health – to combat a well-led Labor Opposition which is campaigning hard on hospital crowding and ambulance ramping.
And the hardest part for the Liberals in making that case is that from March next year, they will be doing it without Rob Lucas.
