The Queensland treasurer, Cameron Dick, began selling his pre-election budget on Tuesday in front of a gaudy maroon sign, spruiking massive discounts in bold capital letters.
The sign – like the budget – has all the subtlety of a “going out of business” sale.
Polling suggests that Queensland Labor is heading for a heavy election defeat. In the budget, it offers voters temporary cost-of-living relief in the form of heavily discounted public transport fares, $1,000 energy rebates and reduced car registration fees.
Each of those discounts lasts only for a limited time – in the case of the cheap 50c bus and train tickets, they will expire three months after polling day.
One media outlet described the government’s cost-of-living measures on Tuesday as “political sugar hits”. In reality it’s more like sachets of artificial sweetener. The high doesn’t last.
Dick says the temporary nature of many of these measures is due to the likelihood that inflation will ease, and interest rates will begin to fall, in the next year. But Treasury has warned that inflation could be baked more deeply into the economy, and that things might not be so simple to fix.
The coal royalty boom is finished and won’t return. Housing construction costs have increased 31% over three years. New dwellings have not kept pace with population growth – mostly overseas migration – which has added “a city the size of Mackay that no one saw coming”, Dick said.
Whoever is in government next year will be faced with far more difficult decisions – they will also have to find the money to continue the discounts, or upset people by hiking prices. If Labor does lose the election, it’s buried a handy little timebomb for the LNP and David Crisafulli to deal with next year.
Unusually in an election year, there doesn’t appear to be much of a war chest set aside for the campaign – just more than $1bn in “decisions taken but not announced” over the forward estimates.
Labor appears to realise that it is so far behind in the polls it needs to start to claw back public support now. There’s no point saving anything for the final stretch, if you begin the campaign 14 points down. The latest Redbridge poll had the LNP leading 57-43 on a two-party basis.
Dick was dismissive of questions that suggested the government was attempting to spend its way to an election win.
He also finished his budget speech talking about the election.
“Queenslanders will be asked to make a choice about their future, not to express an opinion about the past,” he said.
It’s a tough sell. The government is asking voters to think about the future – and forget about all the reasons they started to turn on Labor, after almost 10 years in power. At the same time, its headline cost-of-living measures will expire only a few months after polling day.
