Budget 2022: Coalition’s each-way bid to win election

Josh Frydenberg’s pre-election budget is a political juggling act that will underpin the federal ­Coalition’s campaign strategy to win a fourth term.

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg delivers the budget on Tuesday. Picture: Getty Images

Josh Frydenberg’s pre-election budget is a political juggling act that will underpin the federal ­Coalition’s campaign strategy to win a fourth term.

To secure enough seats, the ­Coalition is seeking to save enough high-income inner-metropolitan electorates while picking off low-income seats in the regions and city fringes.

It must simultaneously appeal to voters in nappy-belt seats and the nation’s greying electorates, many of which hold the key to victory at the May federal election.

The Treasurer’s fourth budget offers cash handouts and tax relief for millions of Australians, including pensioners, carers, low- and middle-income earners, families, veterans and self-funded retirees.

The budget builds on key planks of the Coalition’s campaign strategy: strong economy, jobs, ­national security, health, supply chain resilience, women’s economic security, and fiscal restraint.

A defection and an electoral redistribution since the 2019 election have left the Coalition entering the campaign notionally with only 75 seats out of 151 in the lower house.

It needs a net gain of two seats to reach the ideal minimum total of 77, which allows the government to choose a Speaker from its ranks and still command a ­majority on the floor of the house.

Analysis by The Australian of where the election will be decided has identified 25 Coalition seats that are under threat from Labor, the Greens and the Climate 200 band of independents, and 16 electorates where the Coalition hopes to make enough gains to ­offset losses.

Underlining the challenge the Morrison government faces, the demographic profiles of its under-threat seats and target seats are quite different.

Census data shows that, of the 25 Coalition seats in peril, 17 have a median family income above the national figure, headlined by Wentworth in Sydney’s eastern suburbs, which has a median family income 86 per cent higher than the nation as a whole; the Treasurer’s seat of Kooyong (50 per cent higher) and Higgins (48 per cent higher) in Melbourne’s inner east; and Brisbane (42 per cent higher) and Ryan (36 per cent higher) in the Queensland capital.

In all of these five seats, the Greens and/or Climate 200 independents loom large, either as primary threats or powerful third players whose preferences are ­expected to favour Labor over ­sitting Coalition MPs.

Other Coalition seats in danger where the median family income is at least 10 per cent higher than the national figure are Reid (22 per cent higher) and Bennelong (21 per cent higher), both in Sydney; Peter Dutton’s seat of Dickson in Brisbane (12 per cent higher); and La Trobe on Melbourne’s eastern fringe (11 per cent higher).

 

By contrast, of the Coalition’s 16 target seats, nine, or just over half, have a median family income below the national figure. Lyons in central Tasmania (29 per cent lower) and the NSW south coast seat of Gilmore (27 per cent lower), which the Coalition lost to Labor in 2019, are the two low-income seats that the Coalition hopes to pick up.

Families with young kids living in mostly outer metropolitan areas feature prominently in seven of the Coalition’s 16 seats, while ­families with kids of various ages are dominant in 10 of their seats in danger.

As families, tradies and pensioners face pain at the bowser, fanned by soaring global oil prices triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Mr Frydenberg has halved the 44.2c-a-litre fuel excise for six months.

Treasury says this will save about $30 a week, or $700 over six months, for families with two cars. More than 10 million low- and middle-income earners will ­pocket a one-off $420 cost-of-living tax offset on July 1.

Six million pensioners, self-funded retirees, job seekers and veterans will receive a one-off $250 cost-of-living payment within weeks in addition to indexed rises in the pension.

A $2bn package for women’s economic security and health includes major changes in paid ­­parental leave, ­allowing mums and dads to ­“decide how they will share it”.

Whereas almost all of the ­Coalition’s target seats are rural/provincial (nine out of 16) or outer metropolitan (five), the seats where party strategists fear losses are more urban.

Ten of the 25 are inner-­metropolitan, eight are outer metropolitan and only seven are in the regions or the bush.

Target seats where the budget’s family handouts will appeal ­include Hughes in Sydney’s south, held by Craig Kelly, who defected from the Liberals in February last year to sit first as an independent and then as a member of Clive Palmer’s UAP.

Other young-families seats the Coalition hopes to win are Greenway in Sydney’s west, Blair on Brisbane’s western fringe, Cowan in Perth’s north, the provincial seats of Dobell and ­Corangamite and the Northern Territory seat of Lingiari.

Seniors are the dominant demographic group in five of the Coalition’s target seats: Gilmore; Lyons; the one-time bellwether seat of Eden-Monaro in southeast NSW; Mayo in South Australia, held by Centre Alliance’s Rebekah Sharkie since snatching it from the Liberals in 2016; and the Victorian seat of Indi, a traditional Liberal seat held by independents Cathy McGowan and Helen Haines since 2013.

The Coalition hopes its training and apprenticeship budget sweeteners will be most effective in a raft of seats the Coalition is hoping not to lose, where twentysomethings and those in their early 30s tend to live. They include Wentworth, Reid, Banks and Bennelong in Sydney, Chisholm, Higgins and Kooyong in Melbourne, Brisbane and the neighbouring Ryan, and Swan in Perth.