Palaszczuk buys votes as poll numbers slide

Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk (right) and Treasurer Cameron Dick leave after giving a press conference on the 2023/24 state budget. Picture: Dan Peled / NCA NewsWire

This is an election budget delivered more than a year out from ­polling day.

With Annastacia Palaszczuk’s popularity in free fall and polls putting the opposition in the lead for the first time in years, the third-term Labor government has gone for broke (in terms of spending its record surplus) to try to win back voters.

The irony is that the coal industry, which at times Labor has treated with brutal political expediency – think Adani – is the goose that has laid the golden egg.

Treasurer Cameron Dick has repeatedly denied he broke a 2020 election promise not to raise personal or business taxes with last year’s surprise budget ­announcement of a new coal royalty rate regime – the highest in the world – on record commodity prices.

With the hiked rates delivering $10.4bn in extra revenue in just its first year, the Treasurer is banking on voters not caring whether he dudded the state’s resource ­industry.

Instead, he is blowing almost all of it on things that might win back votes.

The list reads like dot points from a pollster’s focus group; electricity rebates – with some pensioners having their entire year’s power bill wiped – free kindy and cash to tackle youth crime and ease ramping in hospitals.

It shouldn’t be lost that the government will also be profiting from wholesale electricity prices from its fleet of state-owned coal-fired power generators.

Dick is now trying to wedge the Liberal National Party ­opposition on whether it supports the permanent retention of the new coal royalty regime, which it helped pass last year in the parliament.

The mining lobby is running a campaign that will ramp up ahead of the Queensland election next October for the new rates to be dumped, warning it is costing billions in investment and jobs across the state.

Dick says it is “500 days until the next Queensland state election” and that it will be defined by a debate on whether the next government, Labor or LNP, keeps the royalty rates to pay for more cost-of-living relief, better services and lower debt. Given Treasury has forecast royalty revenues will dramatically fall back soon to normal levels, with coal prices already on the slide, it seems the intended political debate may be already losing steam.

This budget will be welcomed by many households struggling with inflation, but the government will need to do more with less (with a predicted deficit for 2023-24) next June when it delivers its next budget just months out from the election.