Friday 26th of April 2024
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people are dancing in the streets…. no surprise: it's raining fiscal strategy…….

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg will spend billions of dollars on middle-class welfare in a pre-election budget he says gives voters a share in Australia’s surging post-pandemic economy.

Pre-budget speculation abounded about how Mr Frydenberg would balance economic management against the temptation to offer voters cost-of-living giveaways before the May election.

But his most striking policy announcement had not been expected at all: A major expansion to a tax offset that will now allow people in 10 million Australian households on up to $125,000 a year to get a $1500 tax refund. The total program will cost $12 billion.

But the tax break is scheduled to expire in July.

“Events abroad are pushing up the cost of living at home,” the Treasurer told Parliament on Tuesday evening.

He said the government’s budget package would offer “targeted and responsible” packages to ease the pressure of rising fuel, food and shipping costs.

But the other measures were not as eye-catching.

For pensioners, people on welfare and veterans, the government found an additional $1.5 billion to cover one-off $250 payments to help them with rising prices.

And the government confirmed it would cut fuel taxes by 20 cents a litre for six months in response to soaring energy prices caused by war in Ukraine; after clawing back billions of dollars in taxation credits, though, it will cost only $3 billion.

Buoyant Frydenberg

Mr Frydenberg was in a chipper mood in the halls of Parliament on Tuesday, shortly before a budget speech that rejoiced in the renewed strength of Australia’s economy.

Unemployment was forecast to drop to 3.75 per cent in the September quarter, a 50-year low, while a booming local economy and international demand for commodities delivered a sudden budget windfall that dropped the deficit to $78 billion, or $20 billion less than was forecast in December.

GDP is forecast to grow at 3.5 per cent next financial year and the gross national debt, incurred during the pandemic, will peak four years earlier than expected.

Boasting of a nation with “more people in work and fewer in welfare’’ Mr Frydenberg was quick to attribute credit for the resurgence to government policy – and said the new budget platform would compound these successes.

“We have overcome the biggest economic shock since the Great Depression,” he said.

After two years of record spending and what appeared to be a classically left-wing approach to spending one’s way out of crisis, Mr Frydenberg stressed that Liberal Party orthodoxy was returning.

“We have drawn clear lines. Banking the dividend of a stronger economy [and] ending economy-wide emergency support,” he said.

Critics warn

But his upbeat address seemed only to underscore those points made by critics who warned against delivering generous election handouts when the economy was performing so strongly and facing possible interest rate rises.

By the government’s own estimate, businesses and households have respectively saved an additional $182 billion and $251 billion since the pandemic struck.

Public attention will naturally centre on the handouts. But there was serious policy unveiled too.

At a cost of nearly $10 billion over a decade, the government will make its greatest investment in Australia’s intelligence and interception capabilities through the electronic espionage agency, the Australian Signals Directorate.

That decision will likely carry significant implications for geostrategic competition in the Pacific.

In addition to recent concerns about the possible acquisition of a military base by China in the Solomon Islands, the United States military has announced its intention to build a new remote base “east of the Philippines” solely for cyber warfare.

New rail and road infrastructure will be built in critical regional areas at a cost of $17.9 billion.

Aged-care snub

After a year in which conditions in the nation’s aged-care services was exposed by the pandemic, the government also found an additional $468 million to improve quality in the sector.

This is a fraction of the $17.7 billion it spent after a scathing Royal Commission the year prior and far short of the amount critics say would be needed to realise the inquiry’s main recommendations.

No extra money was offered to aged-care workers despite pleas from the sector to address shortages that had left homes understaffed during the pandemic.

But more than $340 million will be dedicated to improving medication management for the elderly.

The government is seeking to capitalise on plunging unemployment by making a centrepiece of a program that would spend $2.8 billion on increasing training for apprentices and providing rewards to small businesses that invested in digital skills.

But taken together, the budget’s policy announcements did not seem to amount to a new or coherent chapter in Australian history.

Drop in renewables funding

Renewable energy funding will drop by 15.4 per cent in real terms through to 2025-2025, a drop the government says that accounts for initial establishment expenses for the Australian Renewable Energy Association.

Expenses for programs promoting Australian mining, manufacturing and construction industries will grow by more than 7 per cent and top $4 billion.

There will be, however, an additional $1 billion to protect the health of the Great Barrier Reef.

In many sections, the budget almost appeared to be self-managing, as the government’s financial obligations fell before their eyes.

Spending on social security payments will fall by $5.3 billion over five years, budget papers estimate, due to a better labour market.

Perhaps the simplest boost to Mr Frydenberg’s bona fides as an economic conservative was the sharp and sudden drop in COVID stimulus payments.

In cash terms, government spending dropped by 5 per cent this budget, mostly due to COVID initiatives being scrapped.

But as a proportion of GDP expenditure remains at 27.3 per cent, which economists such as Chris Richardson have said only looks impressive in comparison to recent years.

Net debt is also scheduled to peak at $864 billion in 2025-26, albeit earlier than expected.

Earlier this month, Mr Frydenberg gave a landmark pre-budget speech in which he declared the first fiscal pandemic was now over, with Australia safely through to the other side.

“That now enables us to transition to the second phase of our fiscal strategy,” he said.

But when it came down to it, the Treasurer seemed to be a man more preoccupied by the afterglow than what might follow.

 

READ MORE:

https://thenewdaily.com.au/finance/news-federal-budget/2022/03/29/federal-budget-2022/?breaking_live_scroll=1

 

 

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the other devil…...

An outgoing Liberal senator has unleashed on Prime Minister Scott Morrison, branding him a manipulator who uses his faith as a “marketing advantage”.

Concetta Fierravanti-Wells, who lost her NSW Senate preselection, used a speech to Parliament on Tuesday night to provide “clarity and context” on her leader.

“He is adept at running with the foxes and hunting with the hounds, lacking a moral compass and having no conscience,” she told the Senate.

“In my public life, I have met ruthless people. Morrison tops the list followed closely by (Immigration Minister Alex) Hawke. Morrison is not fit to be Prime Minister, and Hawke is certainly is not fit to be a minister.”

 

READ MORE:

https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/2022/03/29/outgoing-senator-concetta-fierravanti-wells-scott-morrison/?breaking_live_scroll=1

 

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pumping shit at high speed...

Cynicism is the order of the day, far more so than in any pre-election period in the past 50 years. It seems to be the prevailing mood of those who are reporting and recording the issues and events that dominate the federal election that will take place one Saturday in May.

 

BY David Solomon

 

It seems also to sum up the approach of many of the participants. And possibly of quite a lot of people who will vote. It is a sorry state of affairs.

A trivial example. Just a few days ago federal government MPs and their media supporters were disparaging the probable selection of Andrew Charlton, a former economic advisor to Kevin Rudd, who lives in an expensive Eastern suburbs house, as a ‘captain’s pick’ by Labor Leader Anthony Albanese as his candidate for the seat of Parramatta, ahead of a local. Come the weekend we discover that Prime Minister Scott Morrison (and two others) have been given the power to select the Liberal candidates for half a dozen NSW electorates, rejecting local plebiscites. The horrified reaction of those who were outraged at a Labor captain’s pick? Couldn’t spot it.

More seriously. For several years the Morrison Government has been complaining that the Chinese Government refuses to talk to them. Ministers in Beijing won’t pick up the phone to answer calls from their opposite numbers in Canberra. (Not surprising, in a way, given that Prime Minister Morrison has tried to paint himself (and Australia) as a principal antagonist of China, trying to persuade other countries to join his blacklisting of telecom firm Huawei, leading the demand for an inquiry into the origins in China of the Covid virus – these and other provocations being met by a partial Chinese trade embargo.)

Yet given the opportunity to open the way to some dialogue, Prime Minister Morrison refused a request for a meeting by the new Chinese Ambassador to Australia. A cynic would conclude it suits the Morrison Government’s political agenda in the lead up to this election to maintain the rage against China that Defence Minister Peter Dutton does so much to promote.

A cynic would not be surprised that despite the fact that Treasurer Josh Frydenberg has spent the past six months or so desperately winding back the huge financial assistance provided during the initial stages of the Covid pandemic to people and to companies and his expressed concern about budget repair, he can suddenly find very substantial funds in his budget to meet cost of living (and the cost of surviving the election) pressures.

There was a telling sentence in a story by Phillip Coorey, The Financial Review’s political editor, in Monday’s paper where he said:

‘Sources said it was likely the cut (in fuel excise) would be for at least six months because a three-month cut, pushing the issue beyond the May election, would be regarded cynically by voters, while 12 months would be too expensive in lost revenue’. Now there’s cynicism – on the part of his ‘sources’ about the electorate, which they apparently consider can so readily be fooled by maintaining the excise cut for an additional few months past the election.

Cynical also to think that a temporary $5 or $10 saving on a week’s fuel bill will help determine the way people will vote. Sure, the hip-pocket nerve has always been regarded as requiring attention at election time, but to put such faith in so short-term and relatively trivial a measure suggests a very low regard for the electorate.

On the other hand voters have become more and more cynical about their government and what it does, reflecting at least in part the public’s lack of trust in the government. Early this year a study by the ANU found a little more than three-in-10 Australians (34.5 per cent) had a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in the Federal Government. This was only slightly above the level of confidence prior to the pandemic and during the Black Summer bushfires, when only 27.3 per cent of Australians had confidence in the Federal Government.

Confidence actually lifted during the early stages of the pandemic, reflected first in public opinion polling and later in the re-election of State governments in Queensland and Western Australia. But the recent South Australian election demonstrated the validity of the ANU’s finding that confidence in government had retreated.

There are many good reasons why the electorate has lost confidence in the government’s ability to govern well and in its integrity. As to the former, its handling of the health crisis became less and less credible (from the Prime Minister’s declaration that ‘its not a race’ to the Treasurer’s mismanagement of handouts to big businesses that were permitted to profit handsomely at public expense).

As for integrity, reports by the independent Auditor-General exposed rorts associated with electioneering by the Liberal and National Parties on an unprecedented scale that the government hardly bothered to defend but preferred to ignore. Simultaneously, and unsurprisingly, it backed away from its promise to create a body like ICAC in NSW and similar bodies in the other states that investigate and expose corrupt practices in government, and sought to demonise them as kangaroo courts.

The political problem for the Federal Government begins at the top. Many people no longer trust Scott Morrison. Too often the answer to a question as to whether something he has said is true, can be, ‘No’.

Worse, what the Prime Minister has said has sometimes been demonstrably, and not merely arguably, false. This has led to the situation where he can no longer boost his political credentials by being Prime Ministerial. He has squandered the credibility normally associated with Prime Ministerial office. It may be that he has recognised this recently and as a result has been making fewer pronouncements surrounded by Australian flags and/or extras wearing military uniforms. Instead we have been treated to all those working-man costumes (with him posing as a welder, a baker, a candlestick-maker?) while he promises (sometimes for the second or third time) millions for this or that project.

Then there are the independents, and the women. In fact nearly all the independents who could be a threat to sitting Liberal MPs are women. It is hardly a coincidence. And its not at all unlikely that the threat they pose is related to the cynicism permeating, indeed dominating, the current political scene.

In policy terms, they challenge the government’s stance on climate change where the government’s commitments lack substance. Additionally they highlight the Government’s ‘women’ problem, a problem that in essence is bound up in the misogyny evident since its denunciation by Julia Gillard. Additionally, Mr Morrison’s party refuses to deal with its mal-treatment of women within its own ranks.

Cynically, the Government has criticised Labor over its treatment of the late Kimberley Kitching, conveniently forgetting its own history, past and present – Julia Banks, for example, who resigned from the party over the ‘bullying and intimidation’ in politics – and the Liberal Party’s decision several days ago to cut Senator Concetta Fierravanti-Wells from its Senate team.

And all of this is before the election is officially launched when, a cynic would suggest, we switch to the stage where the parties rely less on what they themselves promise to do, and more on the lies they tell about what they claim their opponents will do.

 

 

David Solomon first covered a federal election as The Australian’s chief political correspondent in 1969.

 

Read more:

https://johnmenadue.com/david-solomon-cynicism-rampant-in-this-election/

 

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