Budget: Eye on election as SA Treasurer Rob Lucas discovers the joy of spending

South Australian Treasurer Rob Lucas hands down the 2020-21 budget on Tuesday. Picture: Kelly Barnes

The notoriously parsimonious South Australian Liberal Treasurer Rob Lucas normally lies awake at night worrying about excessive biro usage in the Department of Primary Industries.

Now, the 38-year political veteran has chosen to end his political career like Paris Hilton on a shopping spree in Beverley Hills.

“Now I see the joys of retail therapy,” he deadpanned to The Australian after revealing he’d found a lazy $4bn down the back of the couch to craft the biggest stimulus package SA has ever seen.

This is the first state Liberal budget post-pandemic, with the Liberal governments of NSW and Tasmania to follow this the coming week.

When you look beyond the unfathomably large numbers in outlays you find a political lesson for state Liberal governments everywhere.

Money is currently cheap and the mood of the people is for governments to go hard and do everything they reasonably can to rev-up business and save and create jobs.

Seeing a human abacus like Lucas tap into the Hugo Chavez within is a lesson not just in job preservation but political preservation. Lucas first tasted power in 1993 when the Liberals coasted home after John Bannon presided over the greatest economic disaster SA had ever seen, the 1991 State Bank collapse.

Back then the Liberals promised fiscal rectitude but presided over a moribund economy in need of hard, fast stimulus in the wake of the $3.15bn hole left by the bank’s abject management. Their reward? The voters turfed them out, and Labor governed uninterrupted for 16 years.

Lucas might be a fiscal conservative but he is also a pragmatist and a realist. Two years shy of his retirement, he said the times required a non-ideological approach to economic management, albeit one where voters could see a light at the end of a very long and expensive tunnel.

He stressed that the plan was still to return SA to surplus by 2022-23, an honour that will fall to whoever should be his successor once he departs at the 2022 election. It’s an election this first-term government is determined to win, hoping that its sober and successful management of COVID can dovetail with some uncharacteristic but effective budgetary profligacy, to get us all out of strife in the short term, and leave Labor with no real criticism other than to say they would have spent even more.