Tony Abbott says we should not ask what’s in the budget for “me” but what’s in it for “us”. He wants us all to take a bit of pain for the good of team Australia.



But what’s in the Commission of Audit report for those of us on low or middle incomes, those of us who are sick or disabled or old age pensioners, those of us who are “working families” and as such have become used to various forms of government aid – or those of us who are going to become any of those things over the next 10 years – is an inexorable squeeze.

Benefits that are harder to get, pensions that reduce in real value over time, services which were once free but for which we now have to pay.

The Business Council of Australia head, Tony Shepherd, who led the Commission of Audit review, denies it is an “austerity” plan because the “deeply disadvantaged” are still looked after. Everyone else, he says, should now look after themselves.

For the Abbott government the problem is that because it deliberately chose to consider spending first, and then taxation later, in a quite separate review, the pain right now is going to be felt by the poor and those on lower incomes who receive the bulk of government payments.

The way government could get the wealthy to share “pain” is through the tax system – for example through cutting back the $30bn in superannuation tax concessions they hand out each year and other benefits for those with lazy cash to funnel into investments through negative gearing.

That leaves the government with a plan that looks, and in isolation, certainly is, unfair. Which is why it is grasping for the otherwise inexplicable “temporary” deficit tax, even though it is a short-term fix, breaks a very clear election promise and runs counter to the whole idea that the budget deficit is a long-term structural problem that needs long-term structural solutions.

Broadly, Tony Abbott has a point – the line on the budget graph that shows what the government raises in revenue and the one that shows what it will spend if everything stays the same get further and further apart for the next decade. (The gap has been exacerbated by the government’s own spending decisions in the past six months and by the assumptions the commission has made about future revenue, but the basic point remains.)

And it’s in all our interests for those lines to each head the other way.

It’s just that the long-term pain for the poor and low and middle income families is now all thought out and on the table and probably in the budget, and so far the only pain for the rich that we know about is a short-term tax.

The budget may yet advance long-term measures that hit the wealthy, but so far the heaviest lifting is falling on the poorest and weakest members of the Australian team.