Budget Winner? Loser? Just Shut Up And Have A Beer

ERROL PARKER | Editor-at-large | Contact

It is Friday afternoon and I have been asked to explain the budget and I am not going to do that. Here is what happened. The Treasurer handed down a budget. Forty billion in spending. Taxes on housing investment. Taxes on capital gains. A tweak here, a promise there, the whole thing held together with the quiet desperation of a man who knows the numbers don't add up but has decided that is a problem for a future Treasurer. Then the other side sent out their man. Rhodes Scholar. Oxford doctorate. Former banker/consultant/both who gives a shit. He stood at the dispatch box and told the Australian people that asylum seekers are living it up on JobSeeker. Services Australia's own website says they cannot access JobSeeker at all. He said this anyway. With conviction. On national television. To parliament. Nobody resigned.

It is Friday afternoon. The flies are bad this year. The power bill is up forty percent. The pub opens at ten and the pokies don't care about fiscal policy and the mortgage doesn't care about fiscal policy and somewhere in western Sydney a family who has been paying taxes for nine years just found out their kid might lose NDIS support because they haven't finished the paperwork to become citizens yet.

Turn your brain off.

Have a drink.

You didn't win the budget. You never win the budget. The pub's still open though.