Credit where credit’s due: Peter Dutton’s budget reply had at least one medium-sized good idea in it.
Anthony Albanese’s government has made some good incremental changes on the growth of sports betting, banning the use of credit cards, but the opposition leader aims to take a bigger bite out of the social problem by proposing an ad ban during matches and an hour either side.
Despite broadcasters warning it could be expensive and imperil free sport on TV, the idea is generally popular and will be music to the ears of worried parents who hear kids assess their teams’ prospects in terms of precise sports betting odds.
The crossbench applauded Dutton, and no doubt this will add to pressure on Labor to do more – although I hardly think this will be a vote-defining issue come the 2025 election.
The budget reply contained a few other small measures designed to signal the Coalition is listening to women.
But $4m for ovarian cancer and $5m to review Medicare items related to women’s health is really nothing more than that – a signal, tiny in the scheme of a budget with two-thirds of a trillion dollars of revenue.
The budget reply will be more defined by its three big stinkers.
First, despite supporting most of Labor’s cost-of-living measures and elements of the welfare package, Dutton did not guarantee support for the $40-a-fortnight raise in jobseeker.
He also didn’t rule it out. But it really shouldn’t be this hard. Unless you believe in the deserving and undeserving poor, it should be a clear yes for everyone.
The Coalition had an alternative proposition: raising the income-free threshold to increase the amount welfare recipients can earn before their payments are reduced.
That’s fine, but given that the Coalition’s similar bright idea to allow pensioners to work more was adopted by Labor and barely coaxed anyone back into the workforce, I’m not sure we’ll see a surge back into jobs from this either.
The measure also implies that jobseekers are discouraged from working by their effective marginal tax rate, rather than the more complicated truth that there are structural barriers to employment.
Poor literacy, skills atrophying due to long-term unemployment and pockets of disadvantage in suburbs and regions far away from hundreds of thousands of vacancies elsewhere – these can’t be solved by fiddling with tax rates.
Second, nuclear. Our political editor Katharine Murphy dispatched this one in August as “beyond ludicrous”, so we needn’t spend a lot of time on this.
But to summarise the objections: nuclear would require a carbon price and/or massive taxpayer subsidies to be viable in Australia; it would take a long time to set up; and the Coalition did next to nothing to progress it in nine years in office, so it can’t be taken seriously now.
Third, the migration scare campaign which has been building for several months but which Dutton took to primetime in his budget reply.
The budget updates the net migration figures, revealing that Australia is expected to gain 715,000 people over the next two years, or 1.5 million over five – the figure Dutton prefers because it sounds scarier.
The government prepared for the campaign by publicly noting that net migration was still less than projected before Covid border closures, and only appeared high because borders have recently reopened.
Nobody came during the pandemic, so there are fewer people in Australia exiting now; meanwhile, there is a big rush back of international students, tourists and others that actually help grow the economy.
Of course we need more housing and infrastructure to accommodate a higher population, bring down skyrocketing rents, and maybe allow millennials and Gen Zs to eventually buy a home.
But linking migration to a rental crisis that has been years in the making is incredibly grubby stuff, especially when workforce shortages will probably make inflation worse and this can be helped by higher migration. Dutton himself was calling for more migrant workers as recently as the September jobs and skills summit.
The home affairs minister, Clare O’Neil, has argued more targeted skills assessments and a better points system can ensure Australia brings in people with necessary skills while actually shrinking the migration program.
The permanent migration cap, which, unlike net migration, is directly within government control, was actually reduced from 195,000 to 190,000.
This is one issue I can see playing all the way to the election. In order to defang it, the government will need to address the underlying issues motivating anxiety, such as the housing shortage.
That’s why it was good to see – after months of bitterness and a blow-up in the Senate on Thursday – the government now seriously engaging the Greens to pass its $10bn housing Australia future fund bill.
The prime minister met the Greens leader, Adam Bandt, multiple times on Thursday in a bid to get it unstuck and passed in June.
If the government adopts sensible measures such as the sports betting ad ban and makes progress solving the housing shortage, then judging by the paucity of ideas in the Dutton budget reply, its honeymoon may have a lot longer to run yet.
