Richardson: A Budget beyond Kouts’s control
Treasury figures are always open to interpretation, but there is one metric that is invariably correct: one can always gauge the impact of the annual budget by the quality of the news drops to the Tiser in the preceding fortnight.
As such, by about Sunday this week, it was abundantly clear Tom Koutsantonis was not going to take to the podium on Budget Day to the strains of “Hey, Big Spender.”
Indeed, the first thing I noticed when I got into the utterly superfluous media lock-up and received my traditional brick of budget papers was that the pile felt lighter than usual. The fact there was no Capital Investment Statement might have accounted for it. Or perhaps there was just not much to report.
The media drip-feed was essentially a grab-bag of nickel-and-dime announcements, coupled with a strange rejigging of state revenues that saw the Government alternate between topping up its coffers with an abandoned Emergency Services Levy remission and soothing those most offended with a rebadged pensioner handout described, broadly, as a Cost of Living concession.
“We won’t introduce a new tax on the family home,” Koutsantonis puffed, as he effectively announced the introduction of a new tax on the family home.
But as for the much-promised state tax review wherein, we were told, nothing was off the table, the keynote elements were quickly removed from the table.
Indeed, the main theme of the Treasurer’s vaunted reform appears borrowed from one of the most successful political campaigns of modern times: when Homer Simpson ran for the office of Springfield’s Sanitation Commissioner under the slogan: “Can’t Someone Else Do It?”
You might like
Koutsantonis’s schtick is essentially to agree that payroll tax and gambling tax should be dealt with – just, y’know, not by him.
Joe Hockey, maybe?
If the Simpsons analogy is too highbrow for you, maybe picture Kouts as John Malkovich’s Valmont in Dangerous Liaisons, avowing over and over again: “It’s beyond my control!”
When the headline announcement on budget morning is essentially the Treasurer confirming that he’s not doing something, you know you’re in for a dry budget.
If expectations were lowered in the lead-up, it was only appropriate, for this budget was tailor-made for an age of diminished expectations.
The commitment to abolishing stamp duty for non-real property transactions (essentially all the bits of a business sale outside the land, bricks and mortar), was first given when the GST was introduced. It was first budgeted in 2005-06, and has been subsequently delayed, revived and dumped before finally reappearing yesterday, and coming into immediate effect.
The thing is, in Kevin Foley’s budget it was a footnote. It probably didn’t even rate a mention in the coverage. Certainly, no-one noticed, or appeared to care, when it was never implemented.
Stay informed, daily
But in Koutsantonis’s budget yesterday, it was painted as a major reform, one of two headline acts – along with phasing out conveyances duties on commercial property sales — that symbolised Labor’s newfound commitment to business.
The other selling point was a major commitment to infrastructure spending, a triumph of rhetoric given that it merely locks in existing spending on ongoing projects and general maintenance, along with “stimulus” funding to build and repair roads, which is what State Governments pretty much do as a matter of course.
The absence of any keynote spending measure is no great surprise, nor a bad thing in itself.
The Government has been oft derided for its neo-Keynesian bent to spend its way back to full employment, or at least less unemployment than Tasmania, against whom we tend to benchmark our economic achievements or lack thereof.
Its mantra during last year’s state election campaign was: “Let’s Keep Building South Australia.”
It has now, evidently, adopted that of Steven Marshall’s Liberals – the slogan it so derided – “Backing Business To Grow The Economy”.
But the thing is, the economy is actually shrinking. Labor’s “fingers-crossed” revival plan is predicated on squeezing public spending and hoping private enterprise can stimulate jobs – even though its own forecasts don’t anticipate it will.
It is based on a return to a surplus so modest as to be practically non-existent. And indeed, given it is already more than $200 million smaller than was forecast a mere six months ago, it may never even eventuate.
But these budget measures, importantly, require a long-run approach to Government in South Australia, and that is refreshing in a state that is so often governed with the next opinion poll or by-election in mind.
However, as Keynes himself famously pointed out: “In the long run we are all dead.”
In South Australia’s case though, unless the assumptions underpinning Koutsantonis’s budget hold true, it may not take so very long.
Unfortunately, there’s not much the Treasurer can do about it; it’s beyond his control. Can’t someone else do it?
Tom Richardson is a senior reporter at InDaily. His political column is published on Fridays.
Want to see more stories from InDaily SA in your Google search results?
- Click here to set InDaily SA as a preferred source.
- Tick the box next to "InDaily SA". That's it.
