Morrison is treading softly around
WHATEVER happened to the budget deficit – or indeed, more broadly, the overall budget itself?
It really is quite extraordinary that two weeks out from the 2022 budget, there’s been virtually no media “reporting” – actually, more accurately and honestly, deliberately fed out “leaks” – about what wonderful things it is going to do.
That’s to say, more specifically, if it’s not actually going to cure Covid, it will gaily splash some (more) of your money around it.
Now true there have been certain other “events”, dear boy, to grab the media’s attention – a little war in a faraway country; the shock death of an Aussie icon.
Incidentally, if you want to get an interesting – as in, bizarre – insight into the way people see things, listen to and read British obits of Warnie, like the BBC one claiming he was more highly regarded over there than down here because of the “misbehaviours”.
Anyhow, the budget. Yes, we’ve had those other events, but this next one is not another of your common or garden, thousand-page snoozefests.
It is the first budget of the “post-Covid era”, such as it is and whatever that might turn out to mean, but a budget stuffed with the fiscal baggage of the two prior “Covid” budgets. Secondly, it will be all but officially the Morrison
Frydenberg campaign manifesto for the May election.
This will be the third time in a row the budget’s been used to launch the election campaign. You have to say the previous two didn’t turn out to be exactly masterclasses in political strategy and success.
In 2016, then-PM Malcolm Turnbull and his thentreasurer Scott Morrison thought it was a good idea to launch the campaign off a budget that whacked some sections of the coalition’s base. And then meander aimlessly through a two-month campaign.
That dynamic duo managed to – just – stumble over the line, albeit wiping out the commanding majority that Tony Abbott had won in 2013 with messages that were simple, cut-through digestible and appealing.
In 2019, then – and current – PM Morrison and his thenand-now treasurer Josh Frydenberg used the budget again as the springboard into the election campaign.
As we know, it officially took a miracle – and, unofficially, Bob Brown’s Gaia-worshipping convoy to Queensland – to save the duo’s political skin.
However, I must concede, that looked at from a
somewhat different angle – like those British Warnie obits – the budgets and the “events” along the way could be said to have turned out quite well for ScoMo personally.
He’s ended up as Australia’s 13th-longest serving PM, getting past such notables as Julia Gillard, Malcolm Turnbull and Kevin Rudd.
If he gets his second – bigger, huger, capital-M – Miracle in May, he’ll race past such great Labor icons as John Curtin, Paul Keating and Ben Chifley and into the top 10.
So there really is a lot riding on this budget, whether we get a “top tenner” or Rudd mkII in the Lodge after it.
Oh, yes, and incidentally, the welfare of the other 26 million or so of you.
Now, we’ve come a long way from the shock – and shocking – 2020 budget, delivered late in October, in the very heart of the Covid darkness. That forecast a shocking $214bn deficit for the 2020-21 year, falling only to $112bn in the current year.
It forecast continuing and really only slightly smaller deficits as far as the fiscal eye could see into the future.
Total federal government debt – which had hit zero when Peter Costello ceased to be treasurer in 2007 – would pass $1 trillion by June this year, on the way to $2 trillion. These numbers looked somewhat better in the latest budget update in December.
We never got anywhere near that $214bn deficit; it came in at “just” $138bn. But this year’s deficit is forecast to only be down to $106bn from that $112bn feared.
Further, you could almost breathe fiscally easy – we won’t hit the $1 trillion gross debt mark now until June next year, one year later.
Whoopee. But it’s still on track for $2 trillion, whenever.
The best pointer to the political side of the coming budget was the final “balancing item” line in the long list of all the new spending proposals in the December update.
This was the amounts for “Decisions taken but not yet announced and not for publication (nfp)”.
That’s to say, spending decisions the government had already taken but didn’t want to tell us about yet.
They added up to $16bn over the next four years, with the biggest amount – the biggest bang for them for what is quite literally your buck – some $5.6bn to be spent in the remaining months of this fiscal year out to the end of June.
We’ll find out where that’s going in two weeks. And away we all will a-politicking go.