The Budget nobody will ever deliver again

A number of political and financial events in recent days have combined to shine a spotlight on the troubling financial future facing the national budget, and that of almost every state.

But the solution ultimately is in the hands of voters, not our political leaders.

The 2026 Intergenerational Report projected deficit budgets that will outlast much of the current Australian population, leaving a ballooning debt for those who live long enough to witness a surplus.

Earlier this week, the Reserve Bank Board put runaway government spending front and centre in its decision to take interest rates to a 15-year high.

Addressing the National Press Club this week, Queensland Treasurer David Janetzki fielded questions from journalists about why he wasn’t working harder on the task of repairing the state’s budget. Why wasn’t he serious about cutting spending?

These may not have been the same journalists who pilloried the previous Queensland LNP government, under Campbell Newman, for its efforts to do precisely what they are now demanding – bring the state back to surplus.

But some of them certainly would have helped continue the narrative that the Palaszczuk Labor government built into the devastating “cut, sack and sell” frame it hung on the LNP for a decade.

At a separate function later that evening, Premier David Crisafulli outlined a slow and steady pathway back to surplus over the next four years. As a minister in that zealous, reformist, short-lived government, Crisafulli understands that hard-nosed fiscal discipline is the fast track to the Opposition benches. And understandably, he doesn’t want to go back there.

It was not always this way. In 1996, Peter Costello’s first budget took an axe to spending, and the government was re-elected. John Howard took a new tax to an election in 1998 and survived. Australians once accepted, grudgingly, that responsible government sometimes meant pain.

But that was 30 years ago. And no government, state or federal, has successfully tackled budget repair since then.

Some have tried. In 2014, Joe Hockey’s first budget attempted serious structural repair, but became a political catastrophe that the Coalition spent years trying to live down. The experience of the Newman government was the same.

The lesson absorbed by every political strategist since then has been brutally simple: reform budgets end careers.

The result is a kind of fiscal paralysis. Voters feel the pain of higher mortgage repayments, but they do not connect it to the spending they expect governments to maintain. And no politician has an incentive to make that connection for them, because the messenger gets shot.

New programs are easy to announce and nearly impossible to wind back. Every line item has a constituency and a sympathetic media story ready to go. Cuts are framed as cruelty; restraint as neglect. Meanwhile, the costs of ageing, health, disability support, defence and the energy transition grow relentlessly.

If this is ever to change, Australians are going to have to relearn old lessons: governments that spend beyond their means eventually send the bill to the household budget.

Australia does not lack policy options. It lacks the political permission to use them. Leaders must spend political capital explaining why pain now prevents greater pain later.

But more importantly, voters must be willing to reward such honesty and courage.