This campaign’s enough to make a policy purist put their head in their hands and weep.

The current round of electoral bribes started with the government’s expansion of the education rebate to uniforms on July 13. Cost over four years: $220 million.

Eight days later the Coalition declared that wasn’t good enough and threw open the rebate to any expenses faintly related to a vague concept of education, including after-school music lessons. Cost over four years: $760 million.

Yesterday the government returned fire. Obviously hampered by the limits of a rebate related to education, it has gone straight out for an increase in Family Tax Benefit for families with older kids. Cost over four years: $670 million.

Under Family Tax Benefit A, households earning more than $100,000 a year will be eligible for this assistance. It’s classic middle-class welfare.

Australia has a structural budget deficit, don’t forget, in addition to its actual deficit. Both sides are ignoring it, telling us their promises won’t cost the budget a cent, but banking on the resources boom sending tax revenue soaring again and erasing the deficit.

That’s why this would be such a terrible election for Labor to lose because, having watched the GFC wreck the budget, it knows the resources boom is going to send revenues soaring back to the sort of levels we saw in the last years of the Howard government. At this rate, it’ll be happening on the Coalition’s watch, allowing them to claim yet again they’re the party of surpluses, despite having done nothing except sit back and watch the miners send in their cheques.

It’s cover for the remorseless growth in middle-class welfare, even as Julia Gillard attacks welfare as damaging and Tony Abbott promises to crack the whip on the unemployed. If you’re young, poor, or Aboriginal, or live in a remote community, welfare is terrible. But for Family Tax Benefit A recipients, it’s a rolled-gold path to electoral bribery.