Santa Claus budget no reason for PM to go to early poll

Scott Morrison and Josh Frydenberg on budget night in Canberra. Picture: Getty Images

Some commentators are accusing Scott Morrison and the Liberals of discarding most of what they are supposed to believe in so that they can win another election. Labor is the party always accused of leaning heavily towards big deficits in order to make good on its traditional purpose — to ensure those at the lower end of the economic scale don’t miss out.

The biggest message I got from Tuesday’s budget is that the Liberals have capitulated to the political exigency of winning the next election.

In just a few years, debt will go very close to hitting the trillion-dollar mark. Australia will continue its reliance on mining to make sure the government till isn’t empty. This has been unfashionable for 40 years at least. In the 1980s many doubted the wisdom of having all our eggs in the mining basket. Ours was a wisdom forced on us by the reality of the way the world conducts commerce. Politicians all wanted us to copy the Japanese model until we discovered that the bubble was based on ridiculously high property prices.

The “insult” that the Liberals traditionally threw at Labor was to accuse it of being neo-Keynesians. That insult can never be hurled at Labor again. John Maynard Keynes would have a very wide grin on his face had he been alive to watch Josh Frydenberg on Tuesday night.

It took Labor decades to recover from one Jim Cairns budget in the 1970s. That document was prepared with an absolute lack of rigour. Arguably, it was the worst budget in Australia’s history, although the Abbott/Hockey effort back in 2014 would give it a run for its money. Just to remind you, even a drongo would have known that giving wealthy working women a $150,000 present for childcare was never going to go down well. And what drongo thought that a $7 co-payment for a visit to the doctor was a good idea? Low-income families who were already struggling would have been reduced to begging on the streets.

Sitting with PM Abbott while watching a Swans game on a cold and windy night at the Sydney Cricket Ground, I told him those policies were doomed and would not last till Christmas. He insisted they were his core policies and would not be dropped. They were dropped in early December after a huge public backlash. The erosion of public faith and trust in Abbott was so great that he never fully recovered.

Now the major parties “me too” each other on virtually every policy except industrial relations. We vote more on trust and faith, or the lack of them, than we do on ideology.

Morrison will be an unbackable favourite to win the next election and he will be at Ajax odds of 40-1 on. I know Ajax got beaten, so hope can spring eternal for Anthony Albanese. Being Opposition Leader means holding the worst, most frustrating job in the world, so you can imagine why anyone in that job is desperate to win an election. Labor tends to win rarely and usually does so when a new leader sweeps all before him. Now, though, challenging Scott Morrison is a different task entirely. He has something — I don’t know if it is necessarily charisma — but whatever it is, it sure as hell works.

Despite our popular view that politicians are a sneaky lot, out for their own good, when a PM turns up at a shopping centre or a function they are greeted like royalty. It is the same with this PM. The crowd crushes in around him so they can “touch the hem”. We frequently opine about our distaste for politicians but in all my years in public life I have only been abused three times and on one of those occasions I apologised. I guess I should at this point mention the three hundred loggers who wanted to kill me at Ravenshoe in August 1987. Now that was a day I will never forget.

Many people will suggest that this budget — chockers with goodies and giveaways to just about everybody — is the precursor to an early election.

There is absolutely no reason to hold an early election other than to capitalise on Morrison’s popularity and a Santa Claus budget. I just can’t imagine Morrison mouthing the weasel words that are required when announcing an election that is completely unjustified. It is hard to sound sincere when you are talking bollocks.

Hawke went early in 1984 to capitalise on the internal warfare in the parliamentary Liberal Party as Howard and Peacock continued their remorseless struggle. The mob worked Hawke out and, while he won, he got nothing like the majority he counted on.

The PM doesn’t need to be tricky. He should stick to his guns and go full term.