Federal Budget: Newspaper editors criticise Treasurer Jim Chalmers’ Budget as financially irresponsible

Australia’s newspaper editors have cast their verdict on the federal budget, and if they were presiding over courts of law, the defendant would be sent down.

The predominant view was that the budget is financially irresponsible because it will spend $42 billion more than it raises next financial year. Most editors feel the $17 billion tax cuts over three years are too small to make much of a difference to Australians’ lives.

They complained that the government did not use the budget to try and fix up many of Australia’s problems, including ever-rising taxation thanks to inflation, and housing that is too expensive for many.

The West Australian, The Nightly’s sister paper, asked, “Is that really the best they could come up with?”

The Australian, a right-wing paper controlled by the Murdoch family, said it “lacked ambition”.

The journalist overseeing editorials at Sydney’s Daily Telegraph, James Morrow, argued in a headline: “If Labor wins election, they’ll lock in larger government forever.”

Nine’s metropolitan newspapers did not immediately editorialise on the budget. Political editor Peter Hartcher wrote: “The federal budget’s headline tax cuts are best described as breadcrumbs.”

Another Nine paper, the Australian Financial Review, was one of the most scathing. The budget was a “damp squib,” its editorial said, which demonstrates the government “remains on the same dire, dangerous and deteriorating fiscal trajectory”.

At the Guardian, a left-wing British paper, Australian editor Lenore Taylor said the budget was more generous than desperate, but does not do much to solve the “housing crisis” but “that’s difficult to do in an election year”.

While editorials are generally not newspapers’ best-read sections, they indicate what the top editors think. Given editors can shape public opinion, the reactions to the budget suggest it has failed to impress one powerful class of taxpayers.