Federal budget 2018: Oscar to Coalition as winter looms for Labor

The Treasurer makes the front pages.

Everyone remembers what happened when Joe Hockey jumped on to a marble-topped table at a wild party in the cabinet anteroom on the night Tony Abbott was rolled. It was both crash and crash through.

On Tuesday night, it was a more sober affair as Malcolm Turnbull stood carefully on a chair to address the Treasurer, his staff and all the Treasury-Finance officials who had put a budget together that was anything but crash or crash through.

It was late at night, way too early to gauge the full reaction, so they couldn’t afford to relax just yet. Still, it was so far so good. The front pages, ranging from positive to glowing, had been revealed. According to one guest, after thanking them all from the bottom of his heart, Turnbull added: “I also want to thank you for allowing the Treasurer to be portrayed in more ­guises than an actor. First he was Santa, now he is Angus Young from AC/DC, Back in the Black, and — wait for it — he is even ­Marilyn Monroe standing over a grate in a yellow dress on the front page of the national broadsheet.”

Nobody could complain about the rock star treatment from The Daily Telegraph, or that the slightly daggy Scott Morrison had been transgendered to a sex siren in The Australian.

Especially as there really was nothing flashy or visionary or surprising or even slightly offensive about Morrison’s budget, most of which had been strategically dropped in advance in an orchestrated media strategy to help build a narrative of responsible economic management and to avoid much of the shock and awe often accompanying budgets.

Morrison juggled the economics with the politics, neither Santa nor Scrooge, preferring, or hoping, to be seen as Mr Steady-as-she-Goes. It was solid and it covered every base. Initially modest personal income tax cuts building later for those higher up the scale, provided not only incentives for people to keep voting for the Coalition but enabled the surplus to be brought forward. Not only was it clever, it was back to core business for the Coalition. There was more money for the aged, for medical research, for the environment, for infrastructure, more tax breaks for small business. There was nothing to spook the horses — unless you include the evil company tax cuts — all tied with a wedgie bow for Labor with immediate plans to eliminate bracket creep. That too was clever.

The really clever overarching strategy was to drag the battles back on to Coalition territory of tax and the economy, just as serious electoral tests loom. And, no, not an early election, because the key to success is steady government. The government will use its record of delivery and job creation to convince voters it can be trusted to follow through with its budget plan and to keep the economy, particularly job creation, ticking over.

Labor, meanwhile, promises to fund more of everything including bigger and better surpluses, bigger and better personal tax cuts, billions more for health and education all funded by taxing the rich and big business. To quote Morrison, what it showed was when it came to Labor, too much tax was never enough. On the surface, Labor sounds both bold and benign, then the detail emerges showing billions more raked in from all quarters before being shovelled back out.

Good measures are getting lost in what looks and sounds like a massive regurgitation of taxes and spending. Think La Grande Bouffe.

Unless Malcolm Turnbull is lying through his teeth, which I doubt given the number of times he has ruled it out plus the weight he places on keeping his promises, there will not be a general election. So the early electoral test for this budget and for Bill Shorten’s reply tonight will be the brace of by-elections triggered by the abrupt resignation of West Australian Labor frontbencher Tim Hammond and the return of the citizenship crisis with a vengeance following the High Court’s decision to declare Labor’s Katy Gallagher ineligible to sit in the Senate.

So much for Shorten’s braggadocio that Labor’s processes were so rigorous, so superior to the Coalition’s that he could give a rolled gold guarantee no one on his side was in breach. His hubris led him to spurn Turnbull’s offer last year for a bipartisan approach to ensure an orderly resolution. It would all have been done and dusted before Christmas.

Shorten pretended yesterday that the court had set a precedent when it was completely consistent with its rulings last year which he refused to accept could possibly apply to them. Big mistake.

The timing was both good and bad for the government. Another couple of days to sell the budget would have been helpful — for instance both Sky and the ABC switched to and from Morrison’s traditional lunchtime address to the National Press Club to report on the resignations of Labor’s Josh Wilson, Susan Lamb and Justine Keay, and former Nick Xenophon MP Rebekha Sharkie. Once again politicians were falling like skittles, but this time it was Shorten under pressure. What he showed was he doesn’t handle it well.

The super Saturday of by-elections threatens a bleak winter that could prove extremely dangerous for Shorten, given his stubbornness last year, which he defiantly paraded again yesterday by refusing to concede he got it wrong. It was the lawyers. It was a “new” decision by the High Court. It was the Australian Electoral Commission.

All the by-elections will be in non-government seats, one of which the Coalition is expected to win — Mayo in South Australia, held by Sharkie — so the government will not fall.

If Turnbull also managed to pick up Lamb’s seat of Longman in Queensland, or even Keay’s in Tasmania, it would send a chill through Labor ranks. Likewise, if the government suffered massive swings against it, that would be bad for Turnbull because it would give his enemies a reason to ramp up their orchestrated undermining.

Although expensive, the by-elections also provide valuable on-the-job campaign training in preparation for the main event. Above all, Bennelong, South Australia and Tasmania showed the Liberals can still win elections. Even before last night the government believed it was picking up, albeit off a low base.

Advance announcements of infrastructure spending in Western Australia, Queensland and Victoria have been well enough received locally to show up in the internal surveys.

This budget alone is not enough to win an election. It always was part of the plan to have another economic statement, mini-budget — call it what you like — next year. We will know soon enough how much more needs to be done.