Budget BS: South Australia deserves better
You can almost smell the panic in some quarters about the political gift the Abbott Government has handed Jay Weatherill’s last surviving state Labor administration.
The horror federal Budget has slashed expected growth in state governments’ health and education budgets by $80 billion – and Weatherill has been gifted the perfect cover for another shaky state Budget, to be handed down on June 19.
Treasurer Tom Koutsantonis and Weatherill yesterday released figures on the impact of the federal budget on the state’s forward estimates – and it’s a predictably ugly picture.
They say their Treasury officials have calculated the total impact over four years as a cut of $898 million – the bulk of that in the health budget.
The Federal Government has been quick to point out that actual federal money flowing to SA is due to increase. Koutsantonis recognised this increase in GST receipts yesterday, but also pointed out that the rise is almost completely wiped out by a write-down in state-based revenue measures including payroll, property and gambling taxes.
Weatherill and Koutsantonis are softening us up for a slash-and-burn budget to cope with the changed budget picture – and the Liberals and their fellow travellers in some sections of the media are clearly worried.
They should be.
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Not only do they continue to underestimate the solidity of the Weatherill ascendancy, they don’t seem to grasp the political poison of the federal Budget.
Yesterday, Weatherill painted a clear political strategy – he stated quite baldly that the cuts in the state budget would be sheeted home to Tony Abbott.
Somewhat redundantly, he pointed out that jobs and services would be cut, while fees and charges would increase.
He noted that he had predicted these federal cuts during the election campaign (which always, by the way, elicited a response of “fear and smear” from the state Liberals).
He unveiled giant, bright red, charts showing the “Liberal cuts” in graphic, politically poisonous terms.
Cue squeals from the state and federal Liberals.
Liberal health spokesman Rob Lucas accused Weatherill of hypocrisy, given that state Labor has foreshadowed its own cuts to the health budget.
Somehow, in the Lucas mind, this mitigates the federal cuts – it’s not clear why, given the following statement from his media release:
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“The State Liberals have already indicated we don’t support the federal cuts to health but we also don’t support the Weatherill Government’s even bigger cuts to health,” he said.
So the State Liberals believe nothing should be done to rein in the burgeoning state health budget?
Seriously?
Then there was this from Iain Evans, the Liberal treasury spokesman: “I think this is nothing more than Minister Koutsantonis and the Premier laying groundwork to say this awful state budget is not our fault. Had the State Government been running surpluses in the last few years, they wouldn’t find themselves in this position.”
He’s right about the groundwork being laid, but shouldn’t Evans support spending cuts in the Budget?
If the state Budget is in crisis, as the Liberals keep telling us it is, shouldn’t they be getting behind measures to get it back into the black?
How do you run a surplus without cutting spending?
As for Labor, they are playing a transparently political game. They admit to it, almost with a nonchalant shrug of the shoulders.
South Australians deserve much better from both sides of politics, neither of which have engaged in a sensible debate about the state’s economic problems.
During the election campaign, voters were presented with a choice between the Weatherill mega-Keynesian approach, whereby the state would only survive by maintaining high levels of government investment, or Steven Marshall’s uber-Reaganomics, whereby some vague red tape reductions and modest tax cuts for small and medium businesses were supposed to supercharge the economy.
Neither approach had much credibility.
Now we’re faced with a bizarre situation where Labor will make savage cuts to a Budget which it says isn’t in crisis – and the Liberals oppose cuts to the Budget, which it fervently believes is in crisis.
Hypocrisy? There’s plenty to go around for everyone.
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