There’s one place that always benefits from budget night, no matter what the contents of the budget itself, no matter if it’s an austerity slash-and-burner or a spendathon: Canberra’s hospitality industry. Budget night is the city’s night of nights, when every hotel room and hostel dorm is booked, the restaurants turn people away and what pass for bars and pubs in Canberra are chockers with “revellers” (to use one of those journalist-only words).
But a close second in terms of beneficiaries are the major parties, because tonight is a major fundraising opportunity for the party in government and Thursday is a major one for the opposition. Donors will cram into the Great Hall and the Mural Hall and sundry other rooms throughout Parliament House to share a table with a minister or shadow minister and the chance to bend their ear for a few minutes. Chicken or beef, and a glass of Yellowtail. Bon appetite.
These are the rituals of budget week; indeed the budget, as the great set-piece of Australian politics, is almost entirely ritual, including the absurd lock-up, an enormously expensive waste of six hours that has literally no purpose whatsoever, especially now that more or less every detail except the tax cut cameos and the successful roadbuilding contractor are pre-announced in the days before the budget and 90% of what hasn’t been leaked is handed to the 6pm news bulletins. Still, at least it gives the media class a feeling of power and special status, however inconvenient, and it’s a good opportunity to catch up with interstate colleagues.
Canberra journalists are in the most precarious section of the governing class, because the media industry is in deep trouble. But journalists, by and large, have highly transferable skills. Lose your job in journalism, there’s always spinning, or working as a media adviser or in corporate affairs. The rest of the governing class milling about Canberra on Budget night — politicians, public servants, staffers, industry representatives, lobbyists, economists — have a more secure existence. As the Turnbull government since 2016 has demonstrated, losing your seat as an MP is merely a prelude to being given a post-political gig by a Prime Minister mortified that his political incompetence cost so many of his colleagues their seats. So, collectively, the governing class doesn’t have much of a stake in the budget, not in the way ordinary Australians do.
Decisions made by governments — to cut or raise taxes, to change access to health services, to change pension payments, to protect particular industries, to fund or not fund the tens of thousands of grants programs across the federal government and beyond via grants to state and local governments — have significant impacts on low and middle-income earning Australians outside Canberra in ways that the majority of the people in the budget lock-up, and in parliament, and at the fundraising dinners, and in the bars and restaurants in Kingston and Manuka afterwards, don’t understand, except indirectly.
House of Representatives MPs at least deal with constituents face to face and have to respond to the problems they bring to their offices. But for most of us here, the budget is a parlour game, an abstraction that doesn’t have a great deal of resonance with our own lives, because we’re the class that has enjoyed the successes of neoliberalism these last thirty years. With our transferable skills, in a city divorced from the economic reality of the rest of Australia, few decisions in a budget could ever have a significant impact, except possibly to make those of us with substantial wealth even richer.
At the same time, ordinary Australians, outside the governing class, are more and more disengaged from politics, voting for non-major parties more and more, or not voting at all, or voting as early as they can because they hate election campaigns and desperately try to tune them out, increasingly convinced the system is designed to help special interests, not them. All the careful media management, and the pre-budget announcements, and the ritualised TV appearances, registers little with a huge section of the electorate. For them, it may as well be kabuki, for all that it is meaningful to their lives.
Do you find the ins and outs of budget night fascinating? Email us at boss@crikey.com.au.
Having grown up in the 70’s over on the other side of town in West Belconnen, I’ve never understood the fascination for Kingstun and Marnooka. Perhaps Weedon Cl and the occasional ride into Civic, was just more my style…
Weedon Cl now has the excellent electronics store. If you walk in with few enough social skills, and ask for something geekly hardcore like (say) a Cable Tidy they’ll give you a Nerdcard, with a 70mm ruler (shorter than it sounds, yet disturbingly long enough for Too Many purposes), and the electronic architecture of no less than SEVEN nerdilicious components.
Just saying.
This is good, Keaney.
Agreed.
I don’t frequent “the bars and restaurants in Kingston and Manuka” ever since then-treasurer Joe Hockey, attired in a rugby jersey and attended by a single minder, in his pre gastric-banding days, eye-raped my wife’s T-bone at the Kingston hotel.
#Metoo, seriously.
Ah, the lock-up, a strange & arcane tradition which achieves zilch as much of the budget is willingly leaked by the government. Some of us recall the era when Crikey was banned from the lock-up, heady times indeed.
In hindsight, we didn’t realise what a blessing in disguise it was for the Crikey journo.
Am I mistaken, or some time last decade, was not Crikey embargoed from budget lockups by a previous government? Has that been lifted or no?
Regardless, is Crikey fielding a reporter? If not, would one have been welcome if fielded?
If not, shouldn’t a corporate conflict of interest be disclosed here?
Why is it that no commentator has picked up on the statement that people earning less than $37,000 will get a tax benefit of $200. It simply isn’t true!
Only those earning between $20,300 and $37,000 will get the benefit.