How did the Opposition Leader respond?
The more Turnbull moves to the Centre... the more Shorten will move to the Left, the more ideological hatred will influence labor policies and negativity. They are certain negative campaigns will deliver them government.In his budget reply Shorten doubled down on the strategy that nearly made him PM last year — he wants more redistribution and class warfare; more taxes on companies, multinationals and upper middle to high income earners; vastly more education spending and rejection of university cuts; he upholds penalty rates, backs the banks levy, still demands a royal commission, claims Turnbull and the Treasurer aren’t strong enough to stand up to the banks, and wants a top marginal rate of 49.5 per cent (you work for yourself one day and government the next).
Shorten will abandon the Hawke and Keating pragmatism and economic responsibility, for policies that are once again unfunded and will again lead to larger debt and deficit.A far more pragmatic Turnbull now embraces the 2013 Gillard agenda including the Gonski school model and seeks to fully fund the National Disability Insurance Scheme via the Labor way of another 0.5 per cent increase in the Medicare levy. But Shorten savages both decisions. To retain product differentiation he pledges another $22 billion for Gonski funding, frankly a ludicrous figure, and wants the Medicare levy increase limited to those earning above $87,001.
Shorten is protesting too much, so what else is new?This is the looming political contest that defines our times. We live in a time of reaction, public denial, shallow debate, self-interest and national interest decline.
For Labor, Gonski and the NDIS are icons of political identity and ideological symbolism that assume almost irrational proportions — hence the determination to massively outbid the Liberals on school funds and insist, contrary to the budget papers, that the NDIS is “fully funded” when the government seeks to plug a huge $55bn shortfall over the coming decade.
Turnbull is doing a Rudd... remember how he was "Howard lite"?The truth is that Labor is being squeezed by Turnbull’s dramatic repositioning. Shorten is desperate to keep his product differentiation from Turnbull on fairness, redistribution and company bashing, and the danger is that he goes too far and risks the middle ground. The Australian ethos is becoming far more progressive but Labor is in front of the trend.
More hypocrisy from Shorten...shorten was in furious denial, saying of Morrison’s Tuesday performance: “This is not a Labor budget.” Morrison also agrees it is not a Labor budget. The reality, however, is that probably no budget in the past 40 years has so ruthlessly seized the framework of its opposition — witness targeting the banks, embracing Gonski, funding the NDIS, taxing foreign workers, guaranteeing Medicare, boosting infrastructure via “good” debt accounting and tackling the deficit through higher taxes. That’s comprehensive.
It is an admission of reality: that neither the public nor parliament will tolerate unpopular policies and spending cuts to deliver the surplus and intergenerational fairness we need. Turnbull and Morrison bowing before this truth is a turning point for the nation.
Labor’s big new play, however, was its attack on Turnbull’s proposed increase in the Medicare levy from 2 per cent to 2.5 per cent, designed to raise $50bn over 10 years and finance the NDIS funding gap. This is a proven Labor policy — in its triumphal last Gillard budget Labor announced the NDIS with an increase in the Medicare levy from 1.5 per cent to 2 per cent to finance it.
In short, this is another example of Turnbull adopting a Labor policy. The NDIS is a national project for the disabled. Is it fair to expect the entire community to contribute? This is what Labor believed in 2013 in government but does not believe in 2017 in opposition. What has changed?
Anyone for fairness?The key is Labor’s insistence that the NDIS is a Labor policy, that it is fully funded and that the Liberals, somehow or other, want to undermine it. Social Services Minister Christian Porter says: “Labor has never funded the NDIS. They left a $4bn annual funding gap in the NDIS from 2019-20 which grows each and every year … Labor’s claims that it ‘clearly identified’ enough ‘other’ savings to pay for the funding gap is a lie.” Labor’s full savings were never set aside or allocated to a fund to support the NDIS. “They ended up being washed away by Labor’s increasing cumulative budget deficits,” Porter says. The government’s proposed increase in the Medicare levy is poetic justice, doing to Labor exactly what Labor did to the Coalition via its own Medicare levy increase.
Shorten’s claim the NDIS is fully funded is not tenable — but if that is the case, why is Labor supporting an increase in the Medicare levy anyway? Given its position it now needs to explain how it would fill the NDIS funding gap as shown in the current budget.
This promises to be a bitter and emotional debate. Shorten plays to the hip pocket. But Labor is vulnerable. It has changed its position, makes untenable claims and has decided to make NDIS funding a political issue. This saga is a case study in the class, fairness and redistributional conflict now at the heart of our politics.
