Yahoo Finance Why Scott Morrison needs to ignore armchair treasurers before the budget | Greg Jericho
Who is under greater pressure – the coach of a footy team at the beginning of a season, or the treasurer putting together a budget?
This weekend many across the nation will be filled with a sense of promise of things to come. The AFL men’s season has begun, and those like me who spend rather inordinate amounts of time thinking about footy now join their NRL and rugby brethren wondering if the hopes of summer will transform into reality by spring.
For AFL fans, this off-season has been wonderfully amended. By the time you are reading this, the first AFL women’s grand final will have been decided. As an Adelaide Crows fan, I am for the first time ever hoping the Crows will be known as “March Premiers”.
But with the women’s final over, the switch to the men’s competition and with it desires for a premiership will begin again. With that desire comes the pressures on those running the clubs. Thre is already talk of which coaches are most in need of success. Does two years without playing in the finals mean Port Adelaide’s Ken Hinkley is in trouble? Can Nathan Buckley go six years without winning a premiership and survive? The pressure is on the coaches to deliver, and deliver soon. In the NRL, Wests Tigers coach Jason Taylor was dumped after just three rounds.
Scott Morrison may not be under the pump to quite the same level, but you don’t see reports about looming cabinet reshuffles and talk of him being sidelined when all is going well. And it comes in the run up to a rather odd budget.
It is Morrison’s second budget, so in a sense a continuation of his economic narrative, but it is the fourth of the Abbott-Turnbull government, so at a point where there should be signs of good progress being made. It is also the first budget of this election cycle.
The standard tactic after winning an election is to deliver a “tough budget” – one that is full of “hard choices” that need to be made for the “good” of the economy, and which will deliver benefits before the government next faces the polls.
But this was the formula Joe Hockey and Tony Abbott followed in 2014 and it ended disastrously. It was a budget so poorly designed, framed and argued that it set both Hockey and Abbott along the path to their demise.
And this is the problem for governments when dealing with budgets. Too easily they (and indeed the media) can fall into the trap of seeing them as political statements which are supposed to conform with the narrative of being a “tough budget” or perhaps one that “brings home the bacon”.
The narrative is a seductive thing – almost as seductive as footy fans reassuring themselves that early losses with a young team are fine because they are building for the future and all will come good eventually.
Politicians and political journalists can be seduced by the budget narrative and get carried away with whether or not a budget has delivered the goods to set it on a path to re-election. But such thinking leads to the belief, such as that expressed by Joe Hockey in his valedictory speech about the 2014 budget, that “the Abbott government was good at policy but struggled with politics.”
In reality, it struggled with politics because it was bad at policy.
For Scott Morrison the pressure in this budget “pre-season” has been to deliver (as ever) for families, with the greatest focus on housing affordability.
Already the waters have been tested with suggestions such as allowing first-home buyers dip into their superannuation – a policy that has met with rather tepid response (to say the least), and yet appears to still be a chance to feature in the budget.
But as do footy coaches, treasurers also have to deal with armchair experts – those who played in years past and who still think the old ways are the best. Morrison has no shortage of advice from those on his side of politics such as former Howard government adviser, Niki Savva, who this week suggested the way to tackle housing affordability was to dump the $40bn worth of company tax cuts and instead cut income taxes.
If there is one reason to have sympathy for Morrison it is that the conservative side of both politics and the media still believe that the style of budgets delivered by Howard and Costello during a mining boom remain good politics and policy. As such, he is set the task of cutting taxes and spending, reducing the deficit and also delivering a political win.
But as even Donald Trump is finding out, talk of winning is all nice and well, but once you introduce a policy that affects people’s livelihoods, they don’t care so much about the sales job or the narrative.
Cutting government services under the guise of cutting waste works a lot better when people’s incomes are rising and job security is high. At the moment, we have record low wage growth, full-time employment lower now than it was 12 months ago and the unemployment rate rising.
The government will attempt to write a narrative for this budget, but it must be, above al,l focused on good policy. A housing affordability policy is no good if it is there only to fit the narrative rather than actually fix the problem.
And it would do well to remember that the mining boom years are over, and what amounts to good policy – regardless of what the old warriors might think – has changed.
A budget that treats growth as though that’s all that matters and ignores inequality is bad policy that will, as was the case for Joe Hockey, see Morrison quickly take on a new narrative – that of a coach under pressure to keep his job.
