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Want a shortcut guide to the federal budget? Here are the answers to five quick questions from tonight’s announcement.
And look, even if all the measures announced were fair dinkum and definitely going to happen, this budget is elaborate and messy. It looks like an economic theory having a nervous breakdown in the street.
Josh Frydenberg says this is “a plan” for a strong economy and a stronger future. But it looks more like a weather forecast.
Given Morrison’s evisceration of Bill Shorten just three years ago for failing to provide precise modelling for Labor’s proposed emissions targets, how is it that he can now breezily commit to a target 29 years away with the assurance that a substantial amount of the heavy lifting will be done by technological wizardry currently beyond our ken?
Can you trust a man who exempts himself so readily from the standards he imposes on his opponent?
There are other questions: The tidal shift of global finance is not new. There is zero chance that either the Treasurer or the PM was unaware back in 2019 that Australia would be penalised by global markets for clinging to coal. Did the Treasurer just fail to spot this? Did the PM? Or was winning government in 2019 — courtesy of the climate scare — more important than looking after the national interest?
Further: Glasgow has been in the diary for five years now; the Government’s been aware of it for all that time, and it’s the same Government.
How likely is it, honestly, that a Government that leaves a five-year deadline until the Tuesday before is going to make timely, hard decisions to work towards a target with 30 years left on the clock?
I’m assuming nobody in Melbourne is reading this because they’re all off getting their roots done or just openly, lasciviously strolling about without the threat of having their collar felt by the Recreation Rozzers. But on behalf of all of us at the ABC, may I convey our congratulations to, and admiration of, the great people of Victoria, who have had an awful lot chucked at them this year. The photo in this account of the Great Reopening is just glorious.
Indeed. Just like men work in the arts and at universities, and in child care centres and in tourism and health services.
But the gender trends in this Budget are very clear. To argue otherwise is not credible.
Mr Abbott also shared some thoughts on what he termed a “health dictatorship” being run by the Victorian Government, which he argues is needlessly prioritising the life of the elderly over freedom, viz: “Every life is precious and every death is sad, but that’s never stopped families sometimes electing to make elderly relatives as comfortable as possible while nature takes its course,” he told the committee.
A peripatetic podcast in which Leigh Sales and Annabel Crabb discuss what they’re reading, watching, cooking, listening to or irrationally exhilarated by.
One of them likes show tunes and is a monster who chucks books once she’s read them. The other one wrote this.
The nation divided into two classes of person this week: people in Victoria, and people horrifiedly observing what’s going on in Victoria.
A curfew and declaration of a state of disaster, together with Stage 4 lockdown and Stage 11 Online Form Madness, is what Melbourne encountered this week.
Usually it’s brand new prime ministers still high on the dopamine surge of winning an election whose thoughts stray to reforming the Federation. But Morrison has a different sort of political capital, writes Annabel Crabb.
The temptation for federal governments to attach ideologically-driven conditions to these payments is nearly irresistible, as is the temptation to dive into what are ordinarily state government responsibilities.
This is something that has a significant impact on education.
Hewson is spot on here. The commonwealth has no constitutional responsibility for schools. The PM has an opportunity to act on the shelved proposal to reform the federation and give control – and funding – entirely to the states. What have we got to lose? https://t.co/2COudBdtO8
— Dale Pearce (@DalePearce3) May 6, 2020
If in 2015 I’d received a visit from some Future Fairy who’d told me: “Morning Annabel. Five years from now you’ll wake up to the news that Boris Johnson, who’s now the Prime Minister of Britain and living at Number 10 with the mother of his pending love-child, has been admitted to intensive care suffering from a pandemic virus which started in China with someone eating a bat sandwich and has since shut down New York and occasioned daily two-hour press conferences by Donald Trump (who is now the President of the United States) urging Americans to take lupus pills. Also, Cardinal George Pell will be released from prison after the High Court reverses his conviction on child sex offences,” I would have felt… well. Reinforced in my reflexive scepticism about Future Fairies, at the very least.
Every day as the scale of this present coal-black cloud grows across the globe, it’s harder to spot a silver lining, but perhaps in this country it might be this; that in a time of crisis we formed a national decision-making body roughly half of which came from each of our two major parties, and decisions were made that were well outside the orthodox political comfort zone of the people making them, and that some loud voices shut up for a minute, in recognition that the situation was bigger than their own need never to give an inch.
Getting private hospitals to work hand in glove with the public system?
Asking vast chunks of the schools sector to educate children remotely? Publishing newspapers from empty newsrooms? Whole companies working from home? Turning over hotels to homeless people?
All of this would have seemed impossible just weeks ago.
This week, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg adjusted his soundtrack from “Back In Black” to “Back In Balance”, a phrase whose resolute non-catchiness probably explains why it was discarded at the whiteboard stage by AC/DC.
Mr Frydenberg unwisely employed the present tense on Budget night last year when pre-announcing the “Back in Black” surplus of 2020/21.
Naturally, Labor’s shock loss has left the party reeling. But Scott Morrison, too, should heed the warning it sends for his party’s third term.
