Less Thatcher, more vanilla slice: Frydenberg’s 2020 Australian budget packs a sugar hit
Every treasurer has his thing.
For Joe Hockey, it was cigars and dancing.
For Scott Morrison, it was a black and white satisfied close-up.
For Josh Frydenberg, the defining photo of the hours before the future was handed down was of a vanilla slice.
But comfort eating is necessary when handing down the nation’s largest ever deficit.
A task even harder still for the man who opened his budget speech last year declaring Australia was “back in the black and back on track”.
Like the ghost of hubris past, the mugs printed to celebrate the much mooted but never achieved feat still gleam black in a Liberal party store room, a mocking cup of aspiration now out of reach.
Frydenberg’s vanilla slice sat like an offering before Margaret Thatcher, its custard sweetness doing nothing to take away the iron lady’s tart expression.
One might think she could smell the stench of appeasement in the air. Others would call it despair. The sickly stench of history being made for all the wrong reasons.
Frydenberg, the man meant to bring that surplus home, to make true Scott Morrison’s infamous wrangling of tenses – “we brought the budget back to surplus next year” – was forced to instead announce net debt would fall just short of a trillion dollars.
One thing was immediately obvious. The vanilla slice was nowhere near big enough.
Like Daedalus, who’d built the labyrinth to hold the minotaur, Frydenberg was imprisoned by his own creation – a surplus which never eventuated.
It was what his party had spent years lambasting Wayne Swan for – predicting surpluses, which were very quickly swamped by the global financial crisis. But Swan never held a photo shoot in anticipation of a black and white future.
And Daedalus may have escaped his prison, but he watched the source of his freedom fail, once Icarus took it too close to the sun.
But the morning’s sugar had some effect.
Frydenberg was upbeat as he walked into individual offices, where, Covid-safe plans in place, journalists beavered away at their own desks, instead of the group lockup.
The pandemic has not only changed the economy – it has also changed how journalists learn about it. While usually the press gallery is ushered into committee rooms, guarded by Treasury officials who stand as sentry to any contact to or from the outside world, lest the market learn what the government is thinking before the embargo lifts, the 2020 budget saw reporters confined to their individual offices.
Slightly suspicious Treasury officials kept watch, lest a rogue wifi signal escaped, while on the office TVs parliament continued as if it was any usual day, and not one when Australia learned it was headed towards a trillion dollars in debt.
Frydenberg pointed to the ushering in of early tax cuts, already briefed out ahead of the budget, as Australia’s saviour, along with “the benefits of structural change”, bringing about 4.25% growth, presumably delivered on a chariot pulled by winged unicorns, wearing rainbow clouds as crowns.
But as Thatcher, who not only sits on Frydenberg’s desk guarding vanilla slices, but has also been invoked as his recovery inspiration, once said, you don’t tell deliberate lies, but sometimes you have to be evasive.
In this case, it’s being evasive with reality. One would have to believe an effective vaccine will be created and freely and widely available by late 2021.
One would have to believe that we’ll all start spending, and supercharged instant asset write-offs would in turn supercharge business back to life.
One would have to believe that the bounce back will be swift and continuous and every cent returned in tax will be spent back in the economy, that China’s economy will continue to boom, that the world will resume usual transmissions, that all that time indoors will lead to a rash of lockdown babies, boosting population growth, and that Australia will move on as if it momentarily stumbled on a carelessly left banana peel, but would still Bradbury to the gold. And happily, all of this will happen just after the nation is due to go to an election, and isn’t that coincidentally a great story to tell?
Frydenberg isn’t the only Liberal from Kooyong to announce big deficits.
Robert Menzies made it a boast, happily declaring he’d spend 120 million pounds more than the government collected in 1962, leading to his government’s eighth consecutive deficit. He’d deliver one more before his second stint as prime minister was over.
Frydenberg has always hoped to follow in Ming’s footsteps.
Just probably not like this.
Hockey had looked to Menzies too – it’s where he pilfered his 2014’s “lifters and learners” theme.
Menzies wanted to build a nation. Frydenberg is just hoping to see it survive the year.