Tasmania State Budget 2019: Treasurer dressing up ordinary as extraordinary

To embrace this budget is to embrace dissonance. In a health crisis, road funding is boosted. In a housing crisis, the Government will build bridges and invest in rail.

There will be more funding in the State Budget for roadworks while the state is in the grip of a health crisis. Picture: MATT THOMPSON

TO embrace Peter Gutwein’s sixth budget is to embrace dissonance. In a health crisis, the Government will boost road funding. In a housing crisis, it will build bridges and invest in rail.

In uncertain times, the Government will deliver surpluses as the state slides into debt. An economy that depends unduly on Government spending, that spending will rise at less than the rate of inflation.

The Government has made a virtue not of new spending Nor of increased spending, but of spending at all. There is more money for schools and health next year. There always is. That is how budgets work.

As growth slows and revenues falter and unemployment is the highest in the nation, homeless people are appearing on the streets of Hobart. The economy is booming. We are told these are the best of times.

Mr Gutwein says this budget will deliver for future generations. His strategy, the best efforts of the Government – if the forecasts are not too optimistic – will leave the state more than a billion dollars in the red.

Mr Gutwein calls it modest and manageable.

MORE STATE BUDGET NEWS:

BUDGET 2019: WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW

FAST-TRACK PLAN FOR AFFORDABLE HOUSING

HEALTH: WHAT GOVERNMENT IS DOING ABOUT THE RHH

EDUCATION: EARLY LEARNING A WINNER

It is fair to ask how the state will be radically different after the money is spent, what major transformation the debt has brought, whether the risk was worthwhile.

None would dare describe this as an austerity budget, Mr Gutwein describes it as “prudent”. Much effort has been made to dress up the ordinary business of government as a somehow extraordinary and visionary program of expenditure as $450 million is cut from future spending.

On top of it all, the Liberals have signaled no end to their fight with their own workforce. The efficiency dividend will rile unions, the review of the State Sector Act is fraught with potential for even more conflict. Talk is of vacancy control, natural attrition and continued wage restraint.

It doesn’t seem a likely recipe to attract all those new doctors and nurses and teachers and paramedics and police that we have been promised.