The fun game every politician can play
Imagine a world in which politicians get to see your real-time reaction to their policies and pitches. Matthew Abraham gives this week’s Budget the reality TV treatment.
Mick Atkinson is an unlikely character to dream up a brand new reality TV show concept, but by George, he’s done it.
Most TV shows, like The Block or, one of our family favourites, the Great Pottery Throw Down, are variations on a theme. The British pottery throw-down format, where a field of 10 potters is whittled down week by week, their dreams of glory in clay shattered like a badly-thrown vase in a kiln, is interchangeable with the Great British Bake-Off and the Great British Sewing Bee.
Mick, former Labor Attorney-General, Speaker and MP for Croydon, maintains an eclectic place on Twitter, taking potshots at grammar breaches by journos, posting photos of his garden verge, taunting Greens luminaries who won’t condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and reminding us of often obscure but worthwhile religious feast days.
Oh, and bagging present and former Charles Sturt councillors who rub him up the wrong way. This is his specialty.
During the week, with campaigning for council elections reaching a frenzy of sorts, Mick had a brain wave, tweeting:
“There should be a reality T.V. show in which local-government candidates watch (and react) from a remote location to C.C.T.V. of voters reading their 1000-character profiles, looking at their photos, discussing and coming to a decision on voting.”
This is a stroke of genius, a kind of Gogglebox for grown-ups.
But why stop at council elections? This idea has got legs, and should be upsized to take in state and federal politicians and a whole range of corporate geniuses.
Would it be satisfying, affirming, instructive or simply shocking for them to see, in real-time, how voters, sitting watching telly while doom-scrolling through their iPads, respond to their statements, promises and lame excuses? If they knew what the public really thought of them, would they change the habits of a lifetime?
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This has been the perfect week to record a pilot of the Atkinson TV show. Let’s give it a working title of Budget Bollocks.
If you’re the new Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, or his Treasurer Jim Chalmers, you’ll have us believe the first Labor budget since 2013 is a stroke of pure genius that delivers on all their election promises.
Speaking at the National Press Club in Canberra on Wednesday, Dr Chalmers said balancing support measures with the extraordinary level of inflation was a tough act.
“That temptation becomes a lot stronger when you see people hurting … as a Labor government, as Labor people, we feel that, we care about that, it keeps us awake,” he said.
“Whether it’s food, whether it’s electricity, whether it’s rent, inflation is public enemy number one, inflation is the dragon we need to slay.”
Seriously? If a closed-circuit TV was recording vision in our family room, it might have captured me shouting in the general direction of the screen at this point.
If the cost of living is costing you beauty sleep, and you finally hold the federal purse strings in your hot little hands, wouldn’t you do something about it in your debut budget?
Not only does the Chalmers budget provide no genuine relief and little wages hope for most Australians, it actually takes money away from them.
Rather than extending the Low and Middle Income Tax Offset – the LMITO – for another year, Treasurer Chalmers has chopped it off at the knees. This removes a tax refund of up to $1500 from Australians earning below $126,000 a year.
Anthony Keane, writing in The Advertiser, says the death of the LMITO is “effectively a silent tax rise because people will not notice the money missing until they receive smaller tax refunds from July 2023”. Spot on.
The tax offset would have cost the budget $12 billion, and the Labor Treasurer, sleepless in Canberra, had the cash to keep it going. Bundles of it.
In a typically pithy post-budget analysis published in InDaily, economist, academic and journalist Peter Martin points out that over the four years to 2025-26, Chalmers forecasts $144.6 billion more in tax receipts than was expected in March.
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He says most of this is from much higher company tax flowing from higher mineral and gas prices. This is offset by $92.1 billion in extra spending, mainly due to higher inflation.
“Out of the net $52.5 billion he plans to spend only a net $9.8 billion, most of which is $7.4 billion in recovery funding for communities affected by disasters,” Martin observes.
Here’s my hot tip for the huge audience expected to tune into the first episode of Budget Bollocks. When it comes to federal budgets, most of the big numbers are little more than big guesses.
You know, like the big guesses from Reserve Bank Governor Philip Lowe, who last year told home buyers interest rates wouldn’t rise before 2024. He now says that was “guidance”, not a promise.
It was, he says, conditional on the economy “and this conditionality often got lost in the messaging”. What a pity so many young borrowers didn’t understand the whole “conditionality” thing, Phil.
When trying to nut out if a budget is good or a crock, it’s important to return to first principles. What did they say they’d do before an election, and what have they done?
Apparently, now, the Albanese team mantra is that inflation is public enemy number one, the dragon we have to slay.
That’s odd, because Puff the Magic Dragon wasn’t breathing fire down the pants of Jim Chalmers before Labor won the federal election back in May.
Back then, Labor promised to ease the cost-of-living burden and to deliver a $275 annual saving in energy prices to Australian households. That was Labor’s big twin promise. This week’s budget is a spectacular failure to deliver on those core pledges.
The Chalmers budget expects retail electricity prices to climb by 20 per cent this year and a further 30 per cent in 2023–24 and retail gas prices to climb 20 per cent in both years.
As Martin, himself a former Commonwealth Treasury official, points out, these higher prices “should flow through into the cost of almost everything we buy”.
Whoops, pity nobody saw that dragon coming.
That’s the first episode of Budget Bollocks in the can. You could substitute another B-word for bollocks, but we’re pitching this at a family viewing timeslot.
Matthew Abraham’s weekly analysis of local politics is published on Fridays.
Matthew can be found on Twitter as @kevcorduroy. It’s a long story.
