It was called a Budget reply, but the name was meaningless. Peter Dutton’s Thursday night effort was his election campaign pitch. Michael Pascoe reports it did have one good idea – but only one.

If there was a prize for political hypocrisy, Peter Dutton emerged as the clear winner on Thursday in a crowded field. The Opposition leader, who railed against Labor’s temporary energy rebates, trotted out his temporary halving of fuel excise, which was effectively the same thing. 

 

The alternative government: one good idea in a pit of Trumpiness
by Michael Pascoe

 

What’s been missed in coverage though is how much more tightly targeted, how much more politically fine-tuned this policy is and the implications for the LNP’s election hopes. 

It reinforces the idea that the Coalition is concentrating on the regions and the mortgage belt outer-urban seats. The Liberal Party has given up on the Teal seats and is likely to lose a couple more. 

It’s the mortgage belt commuters of Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, plus the regional citizens who drive the kilometres and are already under the pump, so to speak, of the “cost of living” crisis. Knocking an immediate 25.4 cents a litre off the price of fuel, albeit only for a year, will appeal to them as the Coalition looks first and foremost to shoring up the base that has been deserting both major parties. 

The relatively inner-city and better educated Teal seats won’t be swayed by the stunt, blessed as they tend to be with good public transport and not driving gas-guzzlers. 

Populist sugar hit

As an immediate election bribe, it trumps (the word not used accidentally) Albanese’s little tax cuts in a year or two’s time, despite the massively hypocritical optics of the “party of lower taxes” voting against an income tax trimming. 

While the temporary excise reduction is politically cunning, it has been immediately derided as bad policy, even the Australian Financial Review reporting:  

“Economists warn that Peter Dutton’s pledge to halve the fuel excise is nothing more than a populist sugar hit that will disproportionately favour the wealthy and do little to address the problems plaguing the budget.”

Fair call. 

Overall, Dutton’s “Budget reply” was simply execrable, full of wild assertions, contradictions, half-truths and blatant lies, a very Trumpy exercise in “flooding the zone with shit”, impressionism politics right down to suggesting Anthony Albanese was responsible for a machete being held to someone’s neck. 

One good idea

But it did have one good idea: One of the major parties finally picked the low-hanging fruit of reserving gas for the domestic market. 

If Labor is half smart – nobody would suggest it might be any more than that – it will welcome the opportunity for a bipartisan approach to our gas demands and broadly adopt the policy, cancelling Dutton’s one good idea. 

Mind you, it is a good idea the LNP immediately compromised by pushing it a drill rig too far. In present circumstances, the reservation can be justified but only at international prices. 

Dutton wants gas producers to subsidise local consumers by selling at a lower price than they can obtain overseas. That’s poor economics and bad policy – it becomes a disincentive to produce more gas, if having more gas is the aim. 

It also is a wildly woolly policy the way Dutton failed to explain it in an interview with Sarah Ferguson. Like productivity gains and less crime and more manufacturing and greater moral fibre and the tooth fairy delivering $50 notes instead of coins, Dutton would have the base believe that if he says it, gas will come. 

If I had to select one example of how bullshit-laden Dutton’s speech was, how divorced it was reality though, it was his repeated claim that he would lower inflation. 

Memo Pete: if you lower inflation from where it now is, we would have a problem. Inflation has fallen. It is in the zone it should be in. 

Inflation

Dutton and whoever makes up his stuff either didn’t see it or wilfully ignored Wednesday’s ABS monthly inflation score, overshadowed as it was in post-budget coverage. 

The consumer price index – the thing the RBA is mandated to manage  – landed at 2.4 per cent over the year to February. It’s been under or on the RBA review’s new preference of a 2.5 per cent target since September. 

Even the “trimmed mean”, the overrated and misunderstood measure the RBA prefers, came in at 2.7 per cent for the latest year. It’s been in the RBA’s actual mandated zone of 2 to 3 per cent since December. 

Dutton was doing Australia a disservice by pretending inflation was still a problem, still going up. If the RBA has any integrity, it will be cutting rates again on Tuesday.

The worst of our inflation that partly sparked our “cost of living” crisis was inherited from the Morrison Government. No impartial observer can blame the Albanese Government for that. 

And if anyone looks into the detail of actually where the worst pain in “cost of living” comes from, it is housing for those who rent and those with mortgages taken out in the last five years. 

That’s where we come back to the centrality of housing policy, where Dutton was fluffing around with the minor matters of temporarily reducing permanent migration, albeit without being able to say how, and suggesting that stopping already-curtailed foreigners buying housing for a bit might make a material difference. (It won’t as it’s already small beer.) 

Housing

The only two concrete housing policies the LNP proposes remain allowing access to superannuation, which increases buying power and therefore prices, and scrapping the Housing Australia Future Fund which over five years will deliver at least 30,000 new social housing dwellings. 

That HAFF impact is the only major initiative from anyone to actually increase supply, not just demand. 

But anything that smacks of public or social housing is anathema to the Liberal Party. Too bad about the fifth of Australians who have been priced out of the private market by three decades of policy failure. 

In short, after 1,000 words, Dutton’s campaign launch/Budget reply was another exercise in impressionism politics. No detail, just an image. It was rubbish. 

And it may work well for him. 

Oh, and like Jim Chalmers’ budget, it ignored the reality of Trump unending the world. That’s too hard for our pollies to admit. Better to just pretend it’s only a matter of tariffs and we will stay calm and carry on. You wish.  

https://michaelwest.com.au/the-alternative-government-one-good-idea-in-a-pit-of-trumpiness/

 

 

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GUSNOTE: ON PAPER, THE GREENS SCORE IS HIGHER THAN LABOR'S BUT A GREEN GOVERNMENT WOULD SEND THE PRICE OF ORGANIC FOOD TO THE MOON AND CONTRIBUTE TO OTHER ECONOMIC CATASTROPHES....

GUS HAS BEEN GENEROUS WITH THE TRUMPIAN DUTTONICS....

THE TRUMPET ASKS US TO THINK ABOUT THE POOR PEOPLE WHO CAN ONLY AFFORD A MEAL A DAY... SO, THINKING ABOUT THE PRICE OF FISH, VOTING FOR THE TRUMPET CHEAP RHETORIC WOULD BE LIKE BUYING A LOTTERY TICKET FOR A CRUISE ON THE TITANIC...

IN THE LIBERAL SEATS, IF TRUMPY-MESS ISN'T YOUR THING, VOTE FOR THE MORE AWARE TEALS....

PLEASE VOTE FOR ALBO, WHEREVER YOU CAN.... HE MAY NOT BE PERFECT BUT HE'S THE BEST PM WE'VE GOT....