CLANCY OVERELL | Editor | CONTACT
As Labor Treasuer Jim Chalmers delivers his fourth, and seemingly bare-able, Federal Budget – Australians remember back to the days when this otherwise boring Parliamentary ritual used to make their blood rush.
After a decade of Scott Morrison’s spin, voters have grown used to ignoring everything they hear on budget night, especially after it became clear that former Treasurer Josh Frydenberg has overshot JobKeeper by about $60 billion dollars.
However, in a cost-of-living crisis, with every citizen counting every penny they have – more attention is being shown to how our Federal Government manages our money.
Jim Chalmers has conceded we won’t be in surplus this time, but that is a result of providing relief to both disaster victims and the economically distressed. There does not seem to be anything too crazy in the book this time around.
Unlike in 2014.
Australians will remember back to the first budget of Tony Abbott’s Liberal government, where Treasurer Joe Hockey was given full license to go fucking crazy.
In what can be described as the beginning of the end for Prime Minister Abbott, Joe Hockey’s mantra for the 2014 Federal Budget was “the age of entitlement is over”.
With a housing crisis beginning to roar around Australia, Hockey also said that ‘if you wanna buy a home, get a good job’.
In what can only be described as Aussie Thatcherism, he also said “we need more lifters and less leaners” – as the Liberal Party gleefully wiped Rupert Murdoch’s $800 million dollar tax debt to help ‘stimulate’ NewsCorp.
A controversial $7 co-payment to see a bulk billing doctor, receive x-rays and get a blood test was proposed, while both the Liberal Party’s enemies at the ABC and SBS had their budgets slashed.
Hundreds of millions of dollars were also taken from science bodies who were making life hard for the Abbott government with all of their inconvenient findings about this new thing called climate change.
Blue collar workers were told they were going to have to work until they were 71, and public school counsellors were to be replaced by Christian pastors.
The icing on this cake was was the no-reason subsidies for ballet classes.
Within 12 months of this budget, Abbott had been ousted by Malcolm Turnbull,
