Once upon a time, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg deified Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, architects of the great neoliberal experiment.
But the pandemic killed ideology, as Frydenberg himself once put it. On Tuesday night, he hammered another nail in ideology’s coffin, delivering a big-spending budget that appeared to stray a long way from much of the Coalition’s traditional small government ethos.
Not all conservatives are happy with that drift. Nationals MP Barnaby Joyce told Crikey he had concerns about the size of the budget deficit, and the difficulties future generations would face paying it all back.
“I can’t change my position about debt when I’ve been speaking about debt my whole political career,” the former deputy prime minister said. “We’ve got $1.2 trillion worth of debt. That’d be like $100 bills end to end going around the world 45 times.”
Joyce joins a rump of conservative backbenchers, crossbenchers and pressure groups who have criticised the government’s about-face — wholeheartedly embracing a historic budget deficit after years of slamming Labor over their failure to reign in a far smaller one.
On Tuesday night, LNP Senator Matt Canavan, also a former cabinet minister, told Sky News he was “concerned” about the debt levels. He later went on to suggest the pandemic budget could put Australia at a disadvantage in an increasingly tense stand-off with China.
“We have a higher debt-to-GDP than we have ever had since the end of World War II and, without being too dramatic, we could be on the edge of WWIII with all the tension in our region,” Canavan said.
Queensland LNP Senator Gerard Rennick who, along with Canavan, recently broke ranks with the government over the India travel ban, also said he was “not at all comfortable” with the size of the deficit and the growth of public service departments.
“Labor-lite’s probably a polite term,” he told Crikey.
There’s also some frustration on the LNP backbench over how big-spending measures were dropped to the media before being discussed with them.
Over on the crossbench, former Coalition MP Craig Kelly made his thoughts on the debt known by holding a press conference next to a giant stack of fake trillion dollar bills in the Parliament House mural hall on Tuesday morning.
But it isn’t just the Coalition’s fringes who aren’t happy about the budget. The Institute of Public Affairs, a libertarian think tank that forms a kind of link between the Liberal Party and Sky News, said Labor would have been proud to deliver Frydenberg’s budget.
“The Coalition appears to have given up making the argument for economic reform and smaller government,” director of research Daniel Wild said.
While not strictly affiliated with the Coalition, the IPA is hugely influential in conservative circles, counting Senator James Paterson, backbencher Tim Wilson and speaker Tony Smith among its alumni.
It’s been a confusing budget week. The Coalition’s generosity — investment in childcare, billions for aged care and mental health, and an abandonment of their deficit-hawkishness left Labor (who for years dealt with body-blows over their own deficit spending) red-faced. Some Labor observers noted that Frydenberg appeared almost apologetic about delivering a Labor-tinged budget.
Still, the Coalition has largely fallen in line behind Frydenberg’s ideological about-face. But the party is a broad church, and there will always be a few rabble-rousers up the back.
No journalist so far has been asking the real question on ideology: will they admit their ideology was flawed all along ?
Until Labor are reelected, when you’ll see them pivot instantaneously
The Murdoch commentariat? Pivot? Ya dreamin’!
Pivot? Like a dead-ended rat in a drain.
Wait’l Scotty FM looks like he’ll lose the election – when they’ll 180 to “back Labor” – then, after the election (if Labor win) wait ’til they do it all again, to start laying the gnashers into Labor…. same m.o. they whipped out, to stoop to, with the Howard V. Rudd election. .
Certainly can’t see Lachlan even slightly veering let alone pivoting. I’m obviously hoping for an early demise in the family.
Demise? try extinction = all the good Morlocks are dead.
Hey, fair go!
The Morlocks kept the Eloi fed and free to frolic.
It was only the most obedient who were first to respond to the claxons who were eaten, the rest resumed their hedonism.
My great grand nephews and nieces should be so lucky: if the Tories allow children to be born without trust funds…
“the IPA is hugely influential in conservative circles, counting Senator James Paterson, backbencher Tim Wilson and speaker Tony Smith among its alumni.”
Is alumni at all appropriate? Have they graduated? Is the IPA a respectable accredited academic institution? There are surely better nouns: agents; cadres; creatures; acolytes; moles; plants…
scumbi?
I think they are a throwback to the early “Cold war” games played by the CIA and it’s ilk. Where the Seppo Govt. handed out millions of $$ to organisations to create and spread pro USA propaganda. Readers Digest I believe had such a beginning.
Now they spear to be more of a right wing Lobby Group supported by richlisters.
A strange lot those chaps from the IPA, they look like they were made in a factory somewhere.
And they are all very pimply.
Yes Ray, they all seem to be manufactured from a “Ken Doll” mold. You can pick them a mile away.
Stooges? Commissars?
Leopards don’t change their spots.
What is announced is worthless. What is spent and to whose benefit is the only real measure. I predict a significant chunk of the spending will never happen…the govt will say they have done a great job by navigating the recovery and spending much less than they anticipated…knowing now that they are exaggerating the likely spending outcomes.They have form on this. Don’t listen to what they say…watch what they do.
It’s fistfuls of dollars stuff rather than making structural changes and is funded through the deficit and can be cancelled or not spent any time after the election.
They’ll need a heap of consultants to work out how to spend it.
Imagine the size of the spreadsheet!
Too right.
You may be right that the money is never spent, but if it is, the higher level of debt will be used later to justify their old schtick of cutting services to deal with the debt problem.
It’s telling that they cut taxes in this budget too. For the Libs, the problem is never that there’s insufficient tax income, it’s always that govt expenditure is too high.
Neo-liberalism is the banner under which the agents of finance capitalism march. It is not an ideology, it is a pathology. How else could you describe a system where of $1000 of NDIS funding $500 goes to the private sector entity charged with ‘administering’ it? How would you describe the individuals who are prepared to take that money except as brigands and thieves?
When I was a young person, (some time in the last century), we had a thing called the Commonwealth Employment Service. For a modest public outlay, this service connected people seeking work with employers offering jobs. It did not take a commission, but it did crack down on wage thieves or people who would set unprotected fifteen-year-olds to demolishing asbestos riddled buildings. The CES did not demand of unemployed people that they send forty meaningless job applications to clog up the inboxes (or mail boxes as they were in those days) of employers who had neither the means nor the intention or employing them. Today we spend multiples of that modest public outlay filling a trough for a nauseating collection of parasites who enrich themselves from the misery of their fellow citizens.
This budget merely accelerates the rate at which the common wealth will be plundered.
Our planet is facing a geographic crisis on a destructive scale not seen since the passing of the dinosaurs – and yet we ‘can’t afford to do anything about it‘. No genuine funding has been set applied to address this, but endless buckets of public money, representing the labour of our people, has been earmarked for an absurd war, which were it to become real, would leave the planet a smoking radioactive ruin fit only for scorpions and cockroaches. Perhaps these are the real constituency of the Liberal Party.
I am a peaceful person who tries to think the best of everyone, but today I find that a hard thing to do.
What he said.
Well said, GL!
Until these ‘public services’…such as employment, aged care and childcare…are returned to public (government) control, we will continue to see the theft of taxpayer’s money going to the, Oh! so efficient, private sector to provide their luxury cars, residences and huge bank balances.
The whole scenario is a scandal waiting to be exposed.
Where are you, Labor Party???
And how many Members of Parliament have an interest (perhaps placed at ‘arms’ length on paper) in Childcare Centres and Aged Care?
MMMMaaaaate………..
It is agony reading your recollections, which so tally mine, of a time when this country was different.
As a confirmed, long term expat, I have occasionally returned when things seemed to be on the up.
Good thing that I’ve never gambled with things that matter, such as money.
After a decade’s absence I returned in 1975 in time for the Dismissal.
I came back again in 1983 for the Accord and predicted the inevitable – dare one say the INTENDED result – but hung around, desperately hoping that I was wrong.
I made the same mistake – trusting the good instincts of the populace – in 2007.
Then, to help family in the Year of Conflagration, I returned in 2019 and have been interned ever since.
For the first time, the rest of the world offers no respite.
Yep. The extra millions announced for aged care will go directly to propping up the luxury car market…….as we have seen in the past. None of it will hit the ground where it is needed.
There’s a time and place to worry about budget deficit, and it’s when Labor’s eventually back in power. That way it can be used to stifle anything too “socialist” or “progressive”.