Saved by the Christmas bells? No, grim fate awaits Scott Morrison and his team

Scott Morrison and his team can take little comfort from the fact that the parliament has shut down for the Christmas holidays.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison during Question Time. Picture: AAP

Scott Morrison and every member and senator of the Coalition can take little comfort from the fact that the parliament has shut down for the Christmas holidays.

During the Hawke/Keating years, ministers would take just two or three weeks off before resuming their duties. This Christmas the mobile phones of our political elite will be running hot. They will desperately try to come up with a new, brilliant plan to rescue them from the grim fate which the election promises.

The problem is that no solution is apparent and none appears about to emerge from under the rock it has been hiding beneath.

Some Liberals are clinging to the belief that an April budget, heralded by the mid-year economic statement due this month, which announces a surplus for the first time in a decade, will somehow give them a boost. This is a forlorn hope.

Wayne Swan, as treasurer, was famed for promising surpluses that never came. Ever since, voters are wary of politicians making this prediction. Furthermore, there are those who say that this surplus will be wafer thin and in any event with economic growth slowing many of them will be reluctant to trust the number with which they will be presented. Then you have to wonder if going back into surplus matters any more.

Many ordinary punters are of the view that we have run deficits year after year and the roof hasn’t fallen in on top of us. With retail spending down on last year’s Christmas and with house prices on the way down, Australians are growing financially wary. Mind you, it really is way too late to go on the straight and narrow fiscal path now with household debt at record levels.

With wages stubbornly refusing to rise the mood of the mob is leaning towards doom and gloom. The announcement of a surplus will do little but if the Prime Minister and the Treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, could find a way to make wages move north again, then the election would not look like such a shoo-in for Labor. The usual way to compensate the electorate is by announcing tax cuts but that presents its own quite serious problems at the moment.

Wealthier tax payers deserve some relief. When you pay half of every dollar you earn to the tax man you get sick of it. Neither side of politics will do anything about it anyway because the less wealthy mightily outweigh those with a quid. As the late, lamented Victorian senator Pat Kennelly always said: “Bugger the argument, give me the numbers.”