Prior to becoming Treasurer, Scott Morrison was viewed by many as being one of the better communicators. Thus far he hasn’t been overly impressive in the job. It’s early days and as yet not a lot has happened that has given him the centre stage. He struggled also this week with questions fired at him by the ALP, but those questions highlight problems the ALP itself has with its own economic narrative.
This week the ALP decided to play a little target practice with the new Treasurer. It mostly involved a game of gotcha in which he was asked about various economic and budgetary matters.
I’m not a big fan of politics made into a trivia contest. Few can remember everything all the time, as the current shadow Treasurer Chris Bowen can attest, given earlier this year he failed to correctly cite the tax free threshold and various other tax thresholds.
I would have criticised him, but as someone who writes often on tax matters, I must admit I always need to double check before I can list off the various income tax rates and their thresholds.
Similarly when Wayne Swan was first Treasurer, then shadow Treasurer Malcolm Turnbull thought he was very clever by asking Swan such as: “What does the Treasurer regard as Australia’s current non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment expressed as a percentage?”
It was a silly question, but well asked, because Swan could not give a precise number as the “NAIRU” to begin with is a vague concept rather than a precise number and no Treasurer should put a number to it, but his answer of “as low as possible” while correct, did suggest he had no idea.
This week it was the new Treasurer’s turn when the ALP asked him on Tuesday, “How much has revenue fallen between the coalition’s 2014 and 2015 budgets?”
Should a Treasurer know that off hand? I suppose so, but the question was actually a bit sneaky. Revenue is forecast to increase from 23.5 per cent of GDP in 2014-15 to 24.0 per cent of GDP in 2015-16, but the amount of revenue forecast in the 2014 budget for this year was more than was forecast in the 2015 budget.
Morrison did himself no favours by ignoring revenue altogether and talking about expenditure, but the question itself had little merit.
If he did know the answer would that make him a good Treasurer?
Tanya Plibersek then followed up by : “Based on real disposable income per person, how much have Australian living standards fallen since the last election?”
Again Morrison had no idea, but who would? I write about living standards quite often, I know the level has fallen in the past year in vague percentage terms, but a dollar value? Nope.
Morrison however again did himself few favours by faffing on about “Australians, as they sit at home today...”
And that is most of the point of these questions. They’re not there to challenge any particular policy but to test the ability of the answerer to think on his or her feet.
If he did know the answer would that make him a good Treasurer? I think not. But the test is how well he can perform in the political pantomime that is Question Time.
Morrison, rather too obviously tried to avoid answering the question, and as a result just looked lost. It gave Plibersek the chance to remark, “If the Treasurer does not know, he should just sit down”, which was pretty much the desired outcome of the question.
Chris Bowen then actually asked a decent question which, you could argue, the ALP had been leading up to. He asked Morrison if he agreed with former Treasurer Secretary that “more than half of the budget deterioration is because of falling revenue.”
Rather than acknowledge that to be the case, Morrison kept with his rather silly focus on expenditure. He suggested that “if the level of expenditure to GDP was exactly what those opposite inherited when they went into government... we would be in surplus today - if they simply kept expenditure to GDP at the level they inherited”.
Now that is true, but it also applies to the current government – and nowhere in its budget papers is it suggesting expenditure will fall to anywhere near the level it was in 2007-08.
But while the ALP would seem to have shown Morrison to be not quite across his brief, the problem with the ALP’s questions about deficit and revenue is that they contain the underlying sense that whether or not the budget is in deficit or surplus is an indicator of whether or not a government is doing well with the economy.
In the end behind every good question there needs to be some foundation.
The next day Chris Bowen kept up this tack, “government spending this financial year expected to be higher or lower than the level of spending forecast for the same year at the time of the last election?”
Now Morrison had to answer that it was, but what is the ALP’s point? Do they believe spending should fall? Perhaps they believe that asking such questions will be good for embarrassment purposes as Morrison has to admit to increased expenditure.
That’s fine as far as it goes, but in the end behind every good question there needs to be some foundation.
And what was the foundation of that question?
The ALP are right to argue that revenue has fallen and that is an issue; and Morrison is wrong to ignore it. But so long as the ALP argues that government spending is increasing and that the budget deficit is an issue it plays into the Liberal Party’s favourite narrative that debt and deficit is bad.
The ALP had 6 years in government to either end that narrative or master it, they failed to do either and Tony Abbott slaughtered them on it. Going to the next election trying to argue that the budget needs to be back into surplus and they are the ones to do it, does not strike me as a winning strategy.
Pop quizzes are all well and good, but if the assumptions behind the questions are counter to the ALP’s own policies, they are best to leave them alone.
