Labor is now the party sounding the alarm on saddling future generations with debt, which in gross terms will come in just shy of $1.2 trillion in coming years.
The attack line was revved up in the wake of a budget that committed to another $100bn in spending and tax incentives — nearly all of the economic dividend of lower welfare spending and the higher tax take associated with the red-hot economic recovery since MYEFO.
On Wednesday morning, Anthony Albanese was hitting the airwaves and hammering home the message: debt, debt, debt.
“They spent about $100bn last night, they racked up a trillion dollars in debt, and I don’t think they’ve got a lot to show for it,” the Opposition Leader cried.
“Where is the path back to surplus?”
The Labor leader has a point. If there is such a path, it’s a long and winding road that extends beyond this decade, the budget numbers confirmed.
Spending as a percentage of GDP will still be at 26.2 per cent by the middle of the decade — that’s higher than the peak of 25.9 per cent during the global financial crisis.
Claiming hypocrisy on how the Liberals have embraced big debt and deficits now when in opposition they caned Labor on its stimulus spending during the GFC sounds good.
But then a Labor opposition caning today’s government on abandoning its pre-pandemic obsession with balanced budgets comes with its own whiff of hypocrisy.
In other words: the pinstripes of fiscal conservatism sits awkwardly on a Labor leader.
Meanwhile, Josh Frydenberg was struggling to adjust to his own new tailoring, fitted by those trendy types in the Treasury and the Reserve Bank.
Challenged after his post-budget speech in Parliament House on Wednesday on whether this was a true Liberal budget, Frydenberg revealed a rather startling (for the True Believers) vision of what it now means to be a conservative treasurer.
Out with balanced budgets, in with getting Aussies into homes “in the Menzian tradition”, via an expansion of the first-home super scheme.
Out with paying down debt, in with shelling out more money to retirees to cram the proceeds from selling the family home into super at an earlier age.
Out with “making the tough decisions” and in with more handouts to the regions.
It was not a convincing answer. It’s clear the Treasurer is having trouble fitting into his own new rhetorical wardrobe.
You suspect it will chafe him and Coalition voters more and more as the pandemic disappears in the rearview mirror, and a trillion dollars in debt stretches out to the horizon.
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