Treasurer Jim Chalmers handed down his fifth Budget last week. You might be forgiven for thinking it was his first.
That’s because it has been a perfect example of how not to deliver a Budget.
It went something like this. Put out a Budget. Pump it up with spin and rhetoric. Then react a bit when some of it doesn’t land well — such as this week when Dr Chalmers accused critics of running an “unhinged scare campaign”.
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As the Budget well and truly tanked, one of the Government responses was to refer to further consultation which would be carried out before changes were legislated.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese sought refuge in emphasising that changes on trusts would not be ready to go to Parliament with the first raft of Budget legislation.
Those changes would take “longer to develop”, Mr Albanese said.
And the Government recognised “that there’s a particular issue” with startups relating to capital gains tax, he said.
On Wednesday Mr Albanese said on radio it had always been the case that there would be consultation with startups and businesses, on capital gains tax in particular.
“And we also said that on trusts, that that legislation would be later on, wouldn’t be in the first tranche, because Treasury want to have a consultation process on that,” Mr Albanese said.
So let’s pause for a moment. So this has always been the plan?
Release a Budget that scares the bejesus out of people, then say “don’t worry we are going to consult you about it”. Afterwards.
The political equivalent of shoot first and ask questions later.
What a cack-handed way to go about the most important political blueprint of the year.
Another blow came from New South Wales Premier and senior Labor Party figure Chris Minns on Wednesday, who demanded action to combat bracket creep. It came just days after Opposition Leader Angus Taylor’s pledge to end the “inflation tax”.
And Assistant Minister for Citizenship, Customs and Multicultural Affairs, Julian Hill, disrespectfully urged concerned Australians to look at the Budget papers for themselves.
We have a different take. Perhaps the Budget sell would have gone better for the Government if some of Mr Hill’s colleagues had done a better job of reading the Budget papers.
They could then have taken a leaf out of the book of Assistant Minister for Science, Technology and the Digital Economy, Andrew Charlton, who took questions on radio on Wednesday.
He was the first Government member to clearly explain to worried Australians what the Budget meant for them and what his colleagues needed to be doing in the face of the ongoing confusion about the changes.
“We need to explain how they work, why we’ve introduced them, why we think they are better for our nation,” he said.
It was a timely acknowledgement. It does not of course lessen the degree of difficulty.
For it is already clear that Dr Chalmers’ document is deeply flawed. And perhaps unsalvageable.
