Labor’s budget is a neoliberal nightmare

The budget has no meaningful help included for Australians who feel increasingly disconnected from people delivering it.

The Albanese was all smiles delivering its third budget, but Australians have seen their smiles removed in the current fiscal climate. (Source: Twitter)

On Tuesday, the Albanese government delivered its third budget to a country in a state of economic and societal flux. For Australians who have been living on the edge, and for many who voted for a Labor government to address sweeping issues like social and economic inequality, poverty, and the cost of living, the budget was coming at a critical juncture for millions in the country, and all eyes were on the Treasurer Jim Chalmers to see what his government had in plan to alleviate these issues.    

The morning began with the PM calling out pro-Palestinian protestors for being ignorant in their knowledge of the conflict and mocked their inability to find the Jordan River on the map. Later on the same day, Afghan Papers Whistle blower David McBride was given a draconian 5 year 8 month sentence for blowing the whistle on war crimes. By the afternoon, major party MPs had joined the government in passing Labor's Future Gas Strategy in a session of parliament, and as evening fell, Federal Treasurer Jim Chalmers delivered the third budget since his government took office in 2022. What a day!

Amongst the cacophony of genocide allowance, the diminishment of human rights, and public suppression on voices opposing these allowances and diminishments, the Labor team downgraded their social media crusade and did smiley and goofy Tik-Toks with red and amber Autumn leaves in the courtyard at Parliament. Neoliberal comrades-in-arms proudly spoke of their “considered approach to helping with cost of living”, and an Albanese/Chalmers Labor iteration, still appearing  to enjoy the novelty of government with all its trappings, fell into the default budgetary celebrations with the gusto of a Hawke/Keating government, belligerent to the fact that they were delivering the punters the most painfully inadequate, hollow and ghoulish budget they possibly could.

Chalmers decreed proudly his government’s $9.3 billion budget surplus – a surplus running on autopilot powered by revenues generated by ungodly commodity prices – as a demonstration of the fiscal responsibility of his Labor Government. But perhaps it didn’t impress us at home as much as he may have thought.

Knowing that they couldn’t claim their modestly tweaked version of Scomo’s middle-to-upper income tax cuts as the total panacea, they threw in $300 energy relief steak knives for every Australian without a means test in sight. Thanks to Labor’s budget, Clive Palmer and an unemployed single mother living out of a car would both benefit equally from the cost-of-living energy relief. But Clive still gets a top tier tax cut, while the unemployed single mother doesn’t get anything other than the indexation on her single parent payment.

L:abor seemed to enjoy its third budget, but the population was tentative at best. (Source: Twitter)

Among the incessant and quite expensive and regular military arrangements decreed by Richard Marles, and the environmental PSAs among Tanya Plibersek’s overt subjugation to the coal and gas industry, in the weeks preceding the budget, a raft of real and critical domestic issues resurfaced, perhaps more serious than a $50 billion chop-out to the British nuclear industry – the national epidemic of violence against women.

With calls coming from women’s groups, NGOs, industry groups, even the United Nations, stating that Australia’s current Jobkeeper Rate (the lowest in the OECD) is having a detrimental effect on our society, on our children, elderly, families and women fleeing domestic violence, the budget would be as callous as the government who delivered it. Apart from the nine bucks a week for Rent Assistance, it seems that Scomo’s tax cuts form the bulk of Labor’s empty vision to relieve over three million marginalised Australians, one of six of whom are children. Albanese had appeared   before a women’s march (unwanted) to placate the audience, but the budget ignored every recommendation and kept negative gearing untouched.

On the evening after all the budget kerfuffle had died down, perhaps on the way to the $5,000 per head post-budget private late-night dinner that her party was throwing for industry lobby groups, Tanya Plibersek was saved by the bell by a conveniently placed Jim Chalmers in the foyer of parliament as she stuttered through the first party lines of the paper thin cost of living relief effort. The treasurer didn’t think that his budget was ignorant of the plight of poor Australians, and didn’t think that zero increase to Jobseeker was in “kick in the guts” territory, blurting out the pithy and disrespectful $10 billion of relief, in a $2.3 trillion dollar economy in a galaxy far away from Australians.

On its budget night coverage, the ABC political team, led by ex-Murdoch heavy and neoliberal cheerleader David Speers, kept talking about the “inflationary risk” of the paltry cost of living relief in the budget, while Professor  Steven Hamilton burnished the hive mind instaheap to point out that seemingly any spending on the public, regardless of orders of magnitude more being spent on everything but the public, was inflationary. The press and the economists who long for AFR realestate for their columns every May blocked out the sun talking about the bold and inflationary paltry people facing aspects of the budget, but ignored the morbid and truly harrowing private-facing funnel of money going to subsidies, foreign military development and the oligarch class of our prison island.In the faint afterglow of the budget, like a disappointingly invisible urban Aurorae Australis, Minister for Social Services Amanda Rishworth jumped on the Laborphone and gloated about the handful of crumbs passed down, daring to mention that this $9 miracle was the first back-to-back Commonwealth Rent Assistance increase in “more than 30 years”. The press ran away with the $300 energy relief soundbites, just as Labor intended, and talked it at all of us in the one of three news outlets until we all went back to work.

The country is in a crisis across society, where urgent ideas and vision are required, yet we have seen this government gift $50 billion to the UK submarine industry and splash half a trillion dollars on AUKUS.  We all scratch our heads at a budget that spent $41.4 billion on fossil fuel subsidies, $16.7 billion to wealthy property investors and $254 billion on tax cuts for (still) mega rich, but couldn’t find more than $9 to help the struggling rental class in this country. We see another major party government find $7.1 billion to pour into the money-haemorrhaging privately run fiscal sinkhole that is Snowy 2.0 but can’t give a single dollar to three million Australians living in poverty on Jobseeker.

At no point did this budget feel like it was tangible in any way for the Australian punter. After half a July energy bill is paid, and the $9 rental assistance evaporates, once the low-income tax-cut from Scomo is spent on a petrol payment, the already bitter taste will sour. For all the critical mineral and green hydrogen money thrown away to the magnates and foreign owned mining companies, and for the lack of any spine to commit a generational reform to negative gearing, or something, ANYTHING, apart from Scomos tax cuts and $300 dollars, Australians are being told by this insipid government to suck it up and make do, because real help isn’t coming.