Labor fails character test with budget

Worse still, the massive taxpayer handouts to help people cope with skyrocketing cost of living risks making the problem worse because throwing money into the economy will fuel spending, and it’s spending that’s pushing up inflation, forcing the Reserve Bank to use the only lever it has, and that’s to whack anyone with a mortgage by raising rates.

It’s not that complex and the best analogy I can give you is that’s it’s like trying to drive a car with one foot on the break and another on the accelerator at the same time.

Of all the big spending in the budget, the worst item is the government’s decision to raise unemployment benefits by $40 a fortnight, on top of the Morrison government’s earlier decision to raise them by $50 a fortnight. With almost half a million job vacancies at present, there hasn’t been a better time to find work for everyone who’s serious about it.

Only a government in thrall to the green left and a party that regards people on welfare as its main constituency would have made such a move without any simultaneous incentives to take whatever work is readily available.

On Budget eve, the ABC’s 730 program featured a Sunshine Coast couple complaining that the husband only gets $250 a fortnight from Centrelink to boost the $1300 a fortnight he makes as a casual worker at a service station. The husband said that he and his wife were both “hardworking” but that he lacked the “energy” to work full time; even though he’s a qualified chef and there are reportedly 230 roles currently available for cooks and chefs on the Sunshine Coast.

The question taxpayers are entitled to ask is why should they ever have to support the lifestyle choices of people who’d prefer not to work or to work only part-time, let alone when there is such a massive unfilled demand for unskilled or semi-skilled work? And hasn’t Labor become much more the welfare class party than the working class party when it puts sustaining people on welfare ahead of expecting them to take jobs?

Treasurer Jim Chalmers made a big deal last week of supposedly being the first treasurer since Peter Costello in 2007, and the first Labor treasurer since Paul Keating in 1989, to deliver a surplus. But the $4.2 billion surplus now forecast for the current financial year strictly belongs to Josh Frydenberg, who delivered the 2022-23 budget last May. Chalmers is simply the incumbent when the Frydenberg surplus is coming to fruition.

Indeed, he’s the incumbent who’s currently slated to deliver nothing but deficits for the next decade. What’s more, as experts picked up last week, had Future Fund earnings of $5.3 billion this financial year not been included (as the budget rules now provide), there would have been a deficit of $1.1 billion. And had they been included in 2018-19, the last year before the pandemic, the Morrison government would have been able to deliver a $7.2 billion surplus then, rather than a $690 million deficit.

The fundamental problem that will soon beset our public finances and threaten to impoverish us as a nation is that the government wants to close down the very industries that we rely on to sustain government services and our overall standard of living.

As the treasurer himself conceded, at least 20 per cent of the government’s surplus-producing revenue windfall came from improved tax receipts from the resources sector; principally from the oil and gas exports that the government is determined to minimise in its quest to tackle climate change.

It is quite extraordinary that, as a nation, we are so determined to stop using domestically the fossil fuel resources that we have in such abundance, and so ingenious in devising obstacles to prevent their export to the countries that will gladly pay us for them.

The budget’s maintenance of price caps on coal and gas and tax increase on gas projects can’t help but discourage the multi-billion dollar investment on which our future prosperity rests.

The telling contrast between the Chalmers “surplus” and those earlier delivered by Costello and Keating is that it is entirely the product of serendipity rather than hard decisions. Keating upset vested interests, including unions, to cut tariffs, deregulate the finance market and begin privatisation. Costello cut government spending, changed the tax mix from earning to spending, and introduced welfare reforms such as work for the dole.

In this budget, the government actually reversed one of the Gillard government’s few tough decisions: namely, to encourage sole parents back into the workforce, by taking them off the more generous parenting payment once their youngest child goes to school. After all, plenty of families have Mum and Dad working so why are taxpayers now going to subsidise sole parents until their child hits 14 years of age – it doesn’t make sense?

After the Prime Minister’s earlier admission that NDIS numbers were blowing out towards one million, and costs were blowing out towards $100 billion a year within the decade, the budget confirmed the government’s earlier promise to limit NDIS cost increases to “just” 8 per cent a year. What it didn’t do, though, was detail any of the changes to eligibility or coverage that would be needed to bring this about, presumably because it knows how hard they would be to implement over the fury of disability parents and the likely opposition of the states.

For anyone anxious about our long-term economic strength, there was only one bright note in budget week 2023: the Coalition’s commitment, in Peter Dutton’s budget reply, to allow 24/7 emissions-free nuclear power on land, now that we’re going to have it at sea via AUKUS submarines.

ENJOY MOTHER’S DAY BEFORE IT’S CANCELLED AND RENAMED

Without push back, I wonder how much longer we’ll have “Mother’s Day”? Especially when the so-called Liberal Party in Victoria, supposedly the guardian of traditional values, has just expelled a female MP for upsetting the trans lobby by defending women’s right to their own spaces.

Two years ago, Barnardo’s scrapped its Mother of the Year award because it did “not truly represent all the families and care givers we celebrate daily”. Last year, Bill Shorten had to personally intervene to scrap official government forms that had substituted the term “birth parent” for mother. Then there was the tortured performance of the former head of the federal health department who took on notice the question of how to define a woman.

At least Anthony Albanese was prepared to offer the (somewhat tautological) definition: “a woman is an adult female”. But in Britain, a country we often copy, the NHS now routinely refers to “chestfeeding” and has “gender inclusion units” to cater for people who, for instance, “want to take testosterone while chestfeeding”.

Even after a huge blow-up two years ago, the Australian Breastfeeding Association is still running programs in conjunction with Rainbow Families called “Breastfeeding, chest feeding and human milk feeding”. And the Victorian government (who else?) used “chestfeeding” in its workplace agreement with the union in order to ensure “the language was inclusive and removed gender biases”.

When a pop-up gift stall in Sydney feels the need to refer to “M(others) Day”, the cancelling women contagion is starting to spread even though just 43,000 people described themselves as “non binary” in the latest census (only for the ABS to be at pains to say: this “cannot be used as a measure of gender diversity”) versus the 12,780,000 of us in Australia who are proudly women.

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Mother’s Day isn’t always an easy day to celebrate. It’s hard on those whose Mum is no longer with them, hard on those like me, who have always wanted to be a Mum but couldn’t, or for Mums that are estranged from their children or, tragically, have lost a child. But that doesn’t mean we cancel it to accommodate their pain, it just means we recognise it on the day we give thanks for the women who are our mothers.

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