Profligate, Pragmatic & Political

Scott Morrison may have tried his best last night to shake off the ghost of Tony Abbott, however, the 3 word slogans remain. He described his first budget as “practical, targeted and responsible.”  We think it is profligate, pragmatic and very political.

Take the excessive and profligate $30 billion increase in defence spending.  How responsible is a 33% increase in defence spending over 5 years when general public services expenditure is going down, and rail spending is to be whittled away to zero? That’s right, $0 to be spent on rail in 2020. Is it ‘practical’ that Australia saunters around the seas with a fleet of ‘regionally superior’ submarines when our strained and terribly outdated rail infrastructure is left to the states to fix, with no future help from the Federal Government?

And yes, it seems the Arts have been ‘targeted’, but not in a good way. Millions have been ripped from recreation and culture, with the little we do spend to be reduced by 7%, with further cuts to the ABC and SBS down the line.

The Budget completely ignores the imperative of a clean energy future — hardly ‘responsible’.  It reduces spending for natural disaster relief to zero in 2019, suggesting yet again the Coalition continues to believe that climate change is, as Abbott Government Business Advisor Maurice Newman so sagely advised, a figment of our collective imagination.

The Budget is pragmatic in targeting the top 4% of superannuation beneficiaries, raising a worthwhile amount of revenue for the Government while affecting a small number of people who can afford it. But the absence of any changes to negative gearing suggests lobbyists for property developers have got their way, and generous tax concessions to property investors will continue to distort the housing market.

There’s some scraps thrown to health and education, but we note that universities are still faced with $2 billion worth of cuts, even though fee deregulation, proposed by The Fixer Christopher Pyne and twice rejected by the Senate, has been abandoned. Hardly ‘responsible’ to undermine Australia’s third largest export earner.

However, it’s good that the Budget puts to bed the hysterical ‘debt and deficit’ rhetoric of the Abbott/Hockey era by abandoning the obsession with surpluses and projecting a slow but manageable reduction to the deficit.

This is clearly a very political budget, workmanlike in its mundanity. It won’t scare the horses in the lead up to the election.