The bankruptcy no balanced budget can fix

Budget frames the narrative but is it the only thing that matters at this election

Australia needs more than just another debate about money during the federal election campaign. Picture: MICK TSIKAS

OPINION - Bill Hoffman

IF this Federal Election is to be fought on the Budget as many have suggested it would be, Labor has just won it.

The Opposition leader on Thursday offered voters a stark choice between a Coalition desperately trying to patch up deep divisions in its ranks splashing cash to cover the lack of policy unity and a united Labor leadership team that has spent the past three years establishing where it stood.

Of course, it's a nonsense that the looming election campaign has been run and won.

Well before Bill Shorten opened his mouth, those who prefer stereotypes over substance had retreated to the tribe, shouting tired slogans and muttering cliched claims about past performance to justify their closed minds as they went.

The opposition leader is never going to be an inspirational speaker but he seems to be losing - just - that weirdly boring sing-song delivery that has always threatened to put his audience to sleep or leave them deeply underwhelmed.

What was clear was that he leads a party that has had its internal policy debates and had long-reached policy positions that offer a coherent vision for Australia's future.

As a consequence, at least a decade after Australia should have had a clear energy policy, investors will be given confidence to engage in delivering a low-carbon, less polluting, sustainable future with the capacity to generate new jobs.

The election campaign which is now well and truly engaged ahead of a vote in early May, will bring out the climate-change deniers whose immediate self-interest leaves them unconcerned about the real cost of business-as-usual and those who can't see that Australia can not afford any more of the policy drift it has endured for the past six years.

We're not going to see change on the Sunshine Coast.

The region has for the past three years been served by two visibly busy first-term MPs in Fairfax and Fisher, both of whom are all but assured second terms.

At some point though and hopefully in my lifetime, conservative representatives are going to stop talking about Very Fast Trains and fixing the Bruce and deliver.

In the meantime, sporadic activity on that front will continue to be no substitute for a functioning national highway north out of the capital.

But if anyone has needed a reminder that marginal electorates attract the cream, they have only had to look north to Wide Bay where the Morrison Budget has stuffed cash into the pocket of another first-term MP to do everything from renovate a surf club to subsidise the sugar industry.

Bill Shorten made it clear on Thursday night that headwinds were developing in the global economy.

But Australia's over-reliance on the Ponzi scheme of constant population growth failed to rate any serious mention by either the Government or the Opposition this week.

Until a government is prepared to address the issue we will remain more vulnerable to those headwinds.

Changes proposed to negative gearing aren't retrospective, but they hopefully will nudge future investment to more productive outcomes than just building more homes.

Governments of all stripes have shown they can't deliver in a timely fashion the infrastructure required to support the consequences of their ill-formed population policies.

A huge proportion of the Budget allocations by both major parties has gone towards paying the cost of growth that delivers more problems than opportunities and will continue to do so if left unchecked.

It may suit the political purpose of some to encourage distrust and outright animosity towards a particular racial group but the problems aren't ethnic in origin, it's the quantum.

If anything good can come out of Christchurch, it will include an end to the dog whistling on race that has ruthlessly exploited prejudice to the point it's undermined our national character.

The Budget will form a major part of the election narrative but is not the only conversation Australia needs now.

The politics of fear of the past two decades have left the country on the edge of a bankruptcy of character that continues to deny meaningful recognition of the First Australian people in our constitution, in our parliament and in our communities.

And it has allowed us to at best turn away from the horror that fear has allowed us to inflict on fellow human beings.

They are ills no Budget, no matter how fiscally balanced, can ever fix.

Originally published as The bankruptcy no balanced budget can fix