PAUL MURRAY: Jim Chalmers’ Budget sugar hits aim to distract voters from grim fiscal reality 

Let’s be perfectly clear. This is the Budget that Australia wasn’t meant to have. And it shows.

Some unexpected wind and rain on the east coast changed a weak Prime Minister’s election plans, forcing Treasurer Jim Chalmers to deliver an unintended Budget before the looming national polls.

Consequently, Chalmers has had to unveil bigger deficits to the horizon and beyond, according even to him.

Hardly a vote-winner.

To distract voters from the unfortunate fiscal truths, he’s gone for sugar hits instead of the bucket of the economic cold water that is needed — and which could have been a political option in a Budget delivered after an election.

What pays for Chalmers’ surprise tax cuts?

Effectively, more debt, another $17 billion. He creates a headline for a day, but it buys little more than a cup of coffee a week in two years’ time. Typical.

Slashing spending in a post-election Budget would have been the prudent approach from any Australian government avoiding a debt crisis like the one that has forced US President Donald Trump to take such unpleasant fiscal belt-tightening to save his country from itself.

But not here. No one is prepared to save Australians from their addiction to government handouts.

So Labor has promised the moon and the stars in this Budget and thrown away the future.

Given the debt cliff ahead, there would be no new spending in a responsible Budget. Other than to make provision in the out-years to lift our Defence commitment rapidly to 3 per cent of GDP from below two — where it habituates under Labor — their spendathon should have stopped.

But Defence got nothing more than a promise of hitting 2.3 per cent sometime in the 2030s. The desultory extra $1b is an old provision brought forward, but compares starkly to nearly $70b Labor has spent so far this year on election bribes alone.

It’s not surprising that a man whose academic major was political spin rather than economics has delivered a Budget temporarily floating on rhetoric.

Yesterday’s line was a “‘platform for prosperity” — but the figures show national debt hits a trillion dollars next financial year and the debt to GDP ratio grows from 33.9 per cent now to 37 per cent in 2030, which is a strange way to prosper.

Chalmers is to blame. Government spending under his watch has risen from 24.4 per cent of GDP in 2022-23 to a record high outside the pandemic of 27.2 per cent now and continues to 26.8 per cent in 2035-36.

So Treasury actually predicts a further decade of over-spending, which can only lead to a bleak future.

The latest power bill handouts are not genuine cost-of-living assistance. Their real purpose is arse-covering for a failed energy policy.

At some stage Labor’s handouts fetish will exhaust the economy’s ability to pay for them — but power prices will continue to soar unless the policy changes.

It is not even true that taxpayers are funding these electricity rebates. In a deficit environment, they are also funded by increased debt.

So Australia’s children are paying their parents’ power bills, while watching the chances recede of theirs ever being lower in the mistaken belief they are saving the planet.

It’s way past time to stop sleepwalking towards disaster, but the Albanese Government’s overwhelming interest is re-election.