The media's budget verdict is in — and it isn't pretty for Jim Chalmers and Labor
The government may have hoped to win the front pages with coverage of a budget that delivers cost-of-living relief and a new interventionist agenda. It got something else.
The Albanese government may have hoped to win the front pages with a budget centred on cost of living relief and an new interventionist agenda. It got something else. While it remains to be seen how voters respond to its key measures such as energy bill relief and the green-tinged industry policy dubbed Future Made in Australia, the budget has definitively achieved one thing already: uniting the press against it.
Treasurer Jim Chalmers, often dubbed the Albanese government’s most effective communicator, faced tough questioning in his first interview after handing down the budget with the ABC’s Sarah Ferguson on a special segment of 7.30. Was this a political budget, she asked, that could bring disaffected working class voters back into the Labor tent? And, how could the government defend its decision to put more cash in the pockets of every Australian household, by way of a $300 energy bill relief rebate, while at the same time spruiking restraint?
The headline announcements made by Chalmers last night included two major cost-of-living measures. The first was a $300 rebate on energy that’ll go out to all Australian households, without means-testing. The second was an increase to rental assistance worth roughly $1.9 billion over five years. Economists have already aired concerns about the impacts these and other measures will have on the government’s efforts to bring down inflation.
This wasn’t a political budget, Chalmers reasoned, and on the energy bill relief, he said Australians just don’t have a lot of cash lying around. “You’re about to give them some,” Ferguson prodded.
