The 2024-25 budget was so boring, in political terms, that the national broadcaster, Channel 6, ran a cartoon game beside Treasurer Jim Chalmers’ budget speech. Budgets frequently are, though we’re supposed to pretend they’re not. They were once the occasion for announcing programs; this one is the enactment of stuff we already know.
Labor under Albanese is a centre-right government, one focused on the integration of our military and diplomatic foreign policy with the US as it seeks to retain its empire. Subordinated to that is a domestic policy of domestic industry and infrastructure development, militarily defined, with social benefits flowing as a secondary effect.
The Albanese government has renounced structurally changing any of the big things, such as ownership of our mineral resources and other basic social assets. All that is so far off the table as to be out the window. More accurately put, it is pre-renounced. Since the political defeat of Kevin Rudd’s mining superprofits tax, no government is going to try much except ratcheting the tax take up and down a little.
So, structurally, we are left with the problem of decades: the fiscal crisis of the state. Corporate structures are so multi-levelled, abstract and generalised that tax collection on whole sectors remains virtually unenforceable. This leaves a huge hole in what should be state capacity to ramrod production in some sectors, while introducing genuine social democratic transformation that would seriously address multiple inequalities, climate change and biosphere destruction, as well as a measure of “third sector” possibilities, such as opening spaces for community self-reliance, decommodification, new urban forms, multiple measures of economic activity, etc.
The fiscal gap regarding not merely tax on private sectors but the state ownership of profitable sectors — the people should own more of the mining chain than the ground it’s in — thus determines a reliance on income and sales taxes.
The income tax reliance comes up against the privatisation of life paths, through the winnowing of state facilities in health, education and housing, and the government subsidisation of private advantage and provision of health insurance, private schooling and negative gearing. This produces the trigger balance on new forms of taxation, as well as government wariness of people’s fear that they’ve missed out.
Hence Labor’s necessary support of the stage three tax cuts while in opposition. Hence the $300 energy bill subsidy bung now. To call this bung to billionaires and those on their arse-bones alike a universal service provision is of course a joke; it’s a subsidy to private sector providers, with no capacity to steer change in energy provision.
Hence the relatively meagre contribution to increased rent relief and medication prices. This does not mitigate the fact that low-income people, those on salaries under $19,000 a year, lose out from the modified form of the stage three tax cuts by getting no direct gain from them.
The continued refusal to raise JobSeeker and other benefits, because governments don’t want to be seen to incentivise “dole bludgers”, ensures the inequality gap will yawn yet wider. That is especially so between one layer of the working class, with secure jobs and houses, and the precarious, casualised, floating-hours rentariat. Labor, founded on the centrality of the employed man and family in the early 20th century, moving somewhat towards universal social democracy thereafter, is reverting to its earlier, familist form, creating a strong division within working and middle classes as to life possibility and outcome.
Military spending, militarised industry policy, financial exclusion of the marginal, and a preceding rollover on gas provision and climate change targets. It’s a rightish corporate budget, very SDA-with-solar-panels.
But any criticism from the left gets the justified response. We have a high debt arising from the COVID pandemic, and we have to prepare for the next pandemic. We have to try and limit the parts of inflation that we actually control. But doing anything bold, such as an attack on negative gearing, will cause a propertarian result in 2025, which will put Peter Dutton in the Lodge.
We live in a country where Labor represents asset owners — property and super — while at the same time representing the assetless and poor. Which means that in an exhaustive preferential, single-member system, the latter will go unrepresented, for as long as they do not, or cannot, self-organise.
The main game in 2025 must be challenging Labor from both the red-green left, but also from “community” candidates capable of reaching voters that green parties can’t. Until then, please enjoy these cartoon games.
Has Labor struck the right balance or does something need to budge? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
