Despite the whiff of a welfare crackdown, Australia’s tabloids and rightwing press found themselves grappling with a slightly leftwing budget from a Liberal government.
The treasurer, Scott Morrison, who has previously warned about a “$1tn debt bomb”, delivered a budget on Tuesday night that taxed the big banks, increased income tax for every Australia earning more than $21,500 and fully funded the National Disability Insurance Scheme.
The budget introduced a “demerit system” to penalise welfare recipients who miss appointments because of self-inflicted illness – a possible indication that people have been telling Centrelink they are too drunk or hungover to attend meetings. It also introduced drug-testing for some people on the dole, although how exactly the government will decide who is targeted remains unclear.
Some of the resulting coverage was slightly … unhinged.
Front page of The Daily Telegraph #auspol and the budget play list https://t.co/C0GuljPC1k pic.twitter.com/DHfxViG1B0
— Christopher Dore (@wrongdorey) May 9, 2017
The Daily Telegraph depicted Scott Morrison as barefoot and white-suited with a message of optimism for the people and, for some reason, fairies. The newspaper even had a Spotify playlist, presumably for people to listen to while consuming the budget coverage. It was heavy on Gen X contributions, such as Dinosaur Jr, PJ Harvey and the Beastie Boys.
In the Australian, Morrison was dubbed “Morriswan” (a play on former Labor treasurer Wayne Swan’s name) on the front page, which led with a “$23bn in tax hikes on banks, workers and foreign investors in a bid to ‘reset the budget’” under a headline declaring Morrison had “stolen Labor’s tax dream”. The conomics writer Adam Creighton was sceptical about the numbers forecasting strong economic growth and the road to surplus.
The government’s latest budget has, once again, feather-bedded its bottom line with optimism despite rising wages, falling unemployment and increasing economic growth all being inaccurately and repeatedly forecast since the financial crisis.
Ten years after John Howard lost the prime ministership to Kevin Rudd, Peta Credlin noted that the Howard-Costello era had “ended”.
The Herald-Sun gave all credit for the budget to the opposition leader, Bill Shorten, mocking up a “Labor-lite” beer and leading with the $6bn slug to the banks and a “tax whack” for Aussie workers.
Tomorrow's @theheraldsun federal budget front page tonight #auspol @J_C_Campbell pic.twitter.com/dEJAKDVCzK
— damon johnston (@damonheraldsun) May 9, 2017
The Australian Financial Review editorial was blunt, declaring: “The treasurer delivers the wrong budget.” It practically spat that the budget had a “Rudd-like surge of government debt-financed spending”.
[Scott Morrison] could have brought a budget which removed red tape and regulation, and encouraged real private sector growth. Instead, this budget is about preserving totems like Medicare and locking in another $18bn in spending over a decade on an unreformed school system that does not produce results. It will entrench another Labor spending monument in the form of the National Disability Income Scheme that explodes in cost from $3bn to $20bn a year in five years’ time.
The Sydney Morning Herald, which had most of its staff on strike during the budget, ran an editorial with some faint praise but implored the government to act more on tax reform.
But there’s no serious, and difficult, reform in this budget. There is little effort to tackle how to better spend $464bn in taxpayers’ money. There are plenty of new taxes – in fact $20.8bn – but they are overly reliant on big corporates and pay-as-you-go income taxpayers. Tax reform has effectively stalled and, without it, there’s little security around the financial outlook for Australia.
