If the Government’s approach to the 2013 Budget – spending cuts, tax rises and few electoral sweeteners in an election year – was unorthodox, the Opposition’s response to it was bizarre.
Opposition leader Tony Abbott declared many of the major savings measures in the Budget “objectionable”. Then he said he would keep all of them.
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One can only imagine the scene in the Opposition’s tactics meeting, as they planned the line of attack on the government’s Budget for Thursday’s question time.
Imagine them sitting around, trying to think of countries they could point to as having weathered the six turbulent economic years since the Global Financial Crisis, better than Australia. Read more →
It is doubtful that Julia Gillard’s communications director, the diminutive, Scottish-accented, 457-visa-holding, self-styled hard man John McTernan would ever use an inducement so benign as awarding gold stars to team members who stick to the script.
But if he did, the gold star for the day after the Budget would have gone to Assistant Treasurer David Bradbury. I lost count – during the three minutes he got to answer one question in the first post-Budget question time – of the number of times Bradbury slipped in the phrase “cut to the bone”.
But it was a lot. Should you desire an accurate count, go to our Party Lines tool tomorrow when we have the Hansard up.
Bradbury was not the only one to use Labor’s new descriptor for what Abbott’s lot would do if they won government. But I reckon he had the day’s highest mentions-per-minute ratio. Read more →
If you had to sum up Wayne Swan’s pitch for the 2013 budget in a few words, those words would be: You can’t help bad luck.
Truly, that’s what it mostly comes down to. This Labor government has had wretched luck, starting virtually from the moment it came to power. And its luck has reached its lowest point now, a few months before an election.
It will go into the contest wearing an $18 billion deficit millstone, and forced to make spending cuts which will hurt the electorate.
Of course Labor has made mistakes, but the errors have mostly been rhetorical and political rather than economic – by which I mean the 500-plus times (by the most recent count of the Opposition) that Treasurer Wayne Swan and Prime Minister Julia Gillard swore they would deliver a surplus budget this year.
By their own confident assurances, they condemned themselves. They promised big, they didn’t deliver, they look inept.
It’s part tradition, part protocol and partly just absurd, the annual dance between politicians and the media called the Federal Budget.
This two-step takes place every second Tuesday in May, when hundreds of journalists are voluntarily locked up in the committee rooms of Parliament House. The media’s most recognisable faces and the makeup artists who polish those faces, the writers, producers, editors, graphics geniuses, cartoonists, they all crowd in, each carrying a cloth bag full of felled trees bearing the Federal Budget. Read more →
John Howard on the GST; Julia Gillard on the carbon tax; Bob Hawke’s pledge to lift every Australian child out of poverty by 1990: the Australian public has been burned enough times to know that “political promise” gives the word “promise” a bad rap.
Campaign platforms trade in abstract figments, selling elegant visions of future policies, designed to appeal to voters, but sure to be haggled over before they pass into law.
That’s politics, and we know it, though we might bluster at the our leaders’ latest broken promises. Read more →
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