The Chaser Report - Albo's Budget's Losers and Loser-ers

Episode Date: May 10, 2023

Everyone's a winner, so long as you're already winning.Dom is in Japan so make sure you Tweet him what souvenir he should buy me @domknight Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Chaser Report is recorded on Gatigal Land. Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is The Chaser Report. Hello and welcome to The Chaser Report with Dom and Charles. I'm Charles and this is... Hey, it's Dom, I'm in Japan, Charles. I'm bothering to do the podcast all the way from the other side of the world. Well, you've missed out on a lot here because the budget happened on Tuesday night and there's been dancing in the streets,

it's the biggest news ever. I don't know whether you remember what it was like when the Sydney Olympics was in town. The budget had a similar feel. Oh, I mean, it hasn't been missed here, Charles. You know what a big economic and security partner in Japan and Australia. I mean, I was just walking past that big Shibuya crossing the other day

with the four or five big TVs. All of them had Jim Chalmers and nothing else, just Jim Chalmers. There were trucks driving around with like mobile billboards, screens of Jim Chalmers' face, and the occasional elbow. People are rejoicing in the streets and saying, Charmer's son, he's done it, he's delivered.

That's the message that I'm hearing. But I don't know the detail. I just know that Australia was the winner in the budget. Is that true? Yeah, well, let's go through the winners and losers because there are, in every budget, the only way you're allowed to analysis it anymore is winners and losers.

Right. You can't have any subtlety. There's no gradation. So everyone's a winner or a loser. Yeah, okay. That's right. So first of all, The first winner, I think we can say, for certain, is healthcare.

Healthcare. Or people who need healthcare, which is pretty much everyone, right? So they're bringing back bulk billing. I don't know whether you remember, but essentially, bulk billing a couple of years ago just became so unsustainable that almost every doctor stopped doing it. They've massively increased the amount that, like a little bonus for the doctors that they get. And as a result, it's going to bring back. bulk billing for lots of people.

Oh, wonderful. Because, I mean, I'm not sure, Charles. I really prefer this user pay system that we've had. Because I used to go to the GP all the time and it was free. And the only question I would ask myself was, do I need to go to the GP today? Whereas then, in the past few years, I was asking myself, can I afford to go and get my children vaccinated, for instance? Can I afford to go and get my prescription refilled? And often the answer was no.

And look, it made things more lean and streamlined. It meant that I didn't necessarily have the meds I needed. Yes. But that made life more interesting and exciting. Yeah, no, exactly. I mean, there's a whole sort of, you know, will I die? Jeopardy. Jeopardy.

That you had in, you know, you have in movies, but the coalition policy sort of brought it into everyday life. But I mean, I think there is a philosophical question. Like, do poor people deserve to go to the doctor whenever they need to? I mean, is that just not a gross misover use of resources to allow poor people to access health care? Well, I mean, the other thing, speaking of poor people, is I hear from certainly for every GP that I've ever talked to in the past few years that they're doing it incredibly tough. I don't know, of all the people really struggling in our society, apparently, according to GPs, GPs were the worst hit of any sector. They could hardly afford, you know, to upgrade their outies.

Yeah, oh, exactly. I mean, poor doctors having to, I mean, I heard stories of some GPs pulling two or even three day fortnights having to turn up to work, you know, three or four days of fortnight. I mean, it was just hellish for them. I mean, and that plus, they couldn't go on their ski vacations because they were locked down under COVID and stuff like that. I mean, they've had a tough few years. I mean, I went to the GP several times and I went there for five minutes. to get my prescriptions refilled and paid $90 for the privilege, some of which came back from Medicare.

And I was just working out who was doing it tough in that equation. Was it me for paying the $9 and then whatever it was, $40 with after the rebate? The GP was the one, getting $90 for the 10-minute consultation. I mean, that's rough. That's rough. I really was very kind of in, really, to do that for me. So that's fixed, right? So that's fixed?

Museums and libraries? Is that the second item on the list? Wow. Okay. Yeah, I'm going in. in order of like a bigness of announcements. No, no, like, so apparently, I didn't know this. Apparently, under the coalition,

things had got so underfunded at some of the big museums in Australia that things like the roofs started leaking. Yes. So they've given over $100 million to the National Library, similar amounts to, I think about 60 million to Questicon, Australian Museum. He had it leaking and stuff. But Charles, that was the point.

This sounds like a very short-sighted decision. The whole point was for the water to come in and sweep away Australia's cultural treasures. They were supposed to be eradicated. The books were supposed to be sodden and ruined. And the government sent to put a stop to that. We didn't want culture. We want to get rid of all of that. It's an indulgence.

You don't see... It does strike me as very un-Australian. You could put a football stadium where that National Library is. It's a perfect position. Right there next to Lake Burley Griffin. Well, actually, talking of which, there's a huge amount going to stadiums and not just stadiums in Hobart, which was already reported, but also Brisbane's getting a fact-ton, a metric fact-ton of stadium funding.

Thank goodness. This is a new line of business for federal governments. Usually it's the state governments. What's going on? The electoral politics of Queensland, of course. course. Yes. Well, I mean, that's the thing. Queenslanders, I don't know if you know this, Charles, but to a man and woman, they don't care about cost of living. They don't care about health care of education. All they care about is stadiums. You just build a stadium and just

buy their love. That's all you need. They don't need the arts. Just more stadiums. I hope they're building more stadiums. Well, this is why, Suncorp 2. Well, this is the thing. Well, it's called the Brisbane Arena. Really? And it's for the Olympic Games, but it's two and a half billion dollars that they're putting in. My proposal would be, why don't they build a roof on top of it, like they do with Marvel Stadium. Oh. What you do is you solve the housing crisis.

Oh, what a good idea. Because you can probably fit, I don't know, a few hundred thousand people inside that stadium. Yeah. And boom, housing affordability crisis in Queensland, gone. And the great thing is that everyone who's on job seeking make them work at the stadium. And I'd love to see the Queensland Greens oppose that housing policy. because then it would show what blockers the greens are because they're letting good be the enemy of perfect

or perfect be the enemy of good. Well, also, can you imagine? By not letting just the one stadium be the house. But it'd be the big house, wouldn't it? That's what they'd call it as an inkno. But Charles, also, this helps with the whole employment issue because job seeker was one of the biggest questions coming into this budget. But everyone in Queensland who needs a job and is on the job seeker payment,

they can just be forced to work at the stadium, providing housing, you know, services, whatever, they can just get their jobs in the stadium serving beers to rich people. Yes, that's right. And the thing is, because there's been a lot of concern, the report that was brought down about Jobseeker a few weeks ago pointed out that job seeker is so direly small at the moment that people can't afford clothes that make them look good enough to be employable, right? So they're stuck in a cycle of where they literally just have no dignity to their lives.

So I think it's very clever that what the government's done is, and they've said, look, it needed to be like a hundred bucks a week more, right? Yeah. And instead, the government's gone, 20 bucks a week more. And I think that's really clever because it's like, well, you can't, like, that's $2.85 a day. day, you're not going to be able to afford, I don't know, new shoes or whatever that makes you employable.

No, God, no. But we get the headline that says that we've increased job seeker. And so you can't really complain because you just look like a fucking winger if you go, but hang on, I can't afford anything even though you've increased my money. But Charles, it's sort of genius. Couldn't they then get a slight discount on their admission to the new Brisbane arena? No, I don't think so. No, no, the way, the way, they would need to understand.

You don't understand how stadium funding works. The government puts in billions of dollars, and then the sports codes charge you money and make exorbitant profits. Oh. And that's how it works. And there's no, there's no benefit, there's no public benefit to any of this public money.

So unemployed people on Jobseeker, they could look at the outside of the Brisbane arena and think to themselves, well, thank goodness the federal government built that rather than increasing my jobkeeper to my job seeker, to a living wage. They can just look at the outside. Yes, exactly, because what they can do,

because presumably there'll be big car parks. Yes. They can go, and they probably live in their cars nowadays. If they even have a car, yeah. Yeah, and so they can go and park their car at the state. Well, actually, that might be expensive for them, but, you know, near the stadium. And then they've just got a better view while they're homeless.

Very, very good idea. And I understand older people are getting job seeker. And I'm really hoping that they've worked out the assets test on this, so that the higher rate of job seeker is available to people who are living off the income from their second and third homes and don't technically have an other income source. So they're the people who most deserve it, I think. Well, they're doing a club fund, though.

Absolutely. It's very, very expensive, negatively gearing. You've got to get all this tax advice. It's brutal. So another winner is renovators. Oh, that goodness. Yes. Obviously, you've got to appeal to the constituency of people who watch the block.

The block, yes. The block vote's very important. And so what they're going to do is it's the Saw Griffith idea that we've had him on the podcast. So he's the guy who came up with this idea of electrifying America. Yeah. And he's brought it out to Australia. He's an Australian. And they've obviously listened to him because they're going to give 100,000 climate change-focused

low-interest loans so that you can upgrade all your, like electrify your houses and make them low carbon. What a great idea. Yes. So if you're already quite wealthy, wealthy enough to, for instance, own your own house. Yes. The government will help you by lending money more cheaply than anyone else can get to make it more energy efficient.

What a good idea. I mean, if I owned a house or had any prospect of owning one, I would be so excited about this. It really is, the winners are the winners, really. The winners are the winners. Great. If you're already a winner, then this budget really delivers. Oh, look, it's fantastic. But Charles, full credit.

it to Jim Chalmers for something. I mean, this was the headline here in Tokyo, in the Asai Shimbun and the Niki and all the other local papers here. Yes. Was it the budget was back in black. And not the sort of back in black that we heard a few years ago from Scott Morrison. No, actually going to be back in actual black, which means that the government has so much money that it didn't even bother to spend all of it. So for those of us doing it tough, you can just sit back and tell yourself, well, the government could have spent a little bit more.

Well, yeah, and I didn't choose to do it. It wanted a surplus thing. No, but I think the surplus thing was a little bit accidental, apparently. Apparently, up until a few weeks ago, they were backgrounding that it was probably going to be a slight deficit. Right. But the whole coal price thing has made, you know, coal companies so profitable that it accidentally slipped into surplus, right, which is a bit like, you know how sometimes you go to your bank

account and you check the balance and suddenly there's an extra $4 billion in there that you didn't expect. Yeah, it happens all the time. Yeah. Well, that's, I mean, that happened to me the other day. I think that's what's happened to the government. It seems like a terrible error, doesn't it? We've actually managed to get more money out of fossil fuel companies. I thought, I thought we as a nation had decided we weren't to do that. That money was to go straight to an energy billionaires. But that money, what has happened is, what has happened is all those extra receipts that they get for, you know, from taxpayers, right? They've been boasting the, But most of the extra money, like 89% of all the extra money that they've got for all this windfall receipts,

the fact that there's full employment at the moment, is going to pay the bondholders in New York that Australia has the debt. They're retiring debt, you know, so people like, I don't know, Citibank and Goldman Sachs and anyone who sort of has, you know, BlackRock and Blackstone and. black whatever, you know, like all those bondholders are going to be really pleased with this budget because that's where, you know, they raise all the income tax and then they give it to them. Instead of, you know, spending it on, say, you know, doing it. I'm just looking down at the winners here.

And the Carlision, apparently, you know, we've talked about this on the show. The Carlishan really threw a lot of money around into their own seats for grants, just really unethical stuff, all the car parks. Admittedly, they were never built. They were just announced, so it wasn't as bad as it first sounded. Whereas Labor won't have a bar of that.

They want ethics. They want integrity in the process of pork barreling. So they've created a $200 million thriving suburbs program, which will hand out, and I'm quoting here, merit-based and locally driven grants that address shortfalls in priority. In-marriage-based, Charles, merit-based. Merit-based marginal seat strategy. Yeah, it's locally driven. So driven by the local candidates. Just reeks of integrity.

And thank goodness, because really the old system stank. And this is for thriving suburbs, Charles. They just want the suburbs to thrive unless it's in the seat that they don't need to win. I assume. Oh, I don't know. I haven't seen the detail on it, but why would you waste money in a safe seat? What a stupid thing to do. None of the medical advice contained in the Chaser report should legally be considered medical advice.

The Chaser Report. We should probably go through some of the losers, right? One of the losers that they're saying is gas companies, right? Really? Yeah, because there's this extra petroleum resources rent tax levy that the government's been sort of going, oh, yeah, yeah, we've pulled an extra $2.4 billion out of gas companies. Now, my understanding, I might be wrong,

but it was being explained on the radio this morning. And the way, it's actually just a cash flow thing. So apparently, it's actually just a changing of the way the offsets work. Oh, that's pretty tricky. So that they get $2.4 billion more this year, but actually across the entire sort of long term, it won't mean any extra tax at all. It's just literally accounting trickery.

And you look at some of these things where you go, oh, good, they're cracking down on fossil fuels. But actually, when you look into the detail, you go, oh, actually, they're not. Same with job seeker. Like, oh, they're increasing job seeker. Oh, it's $2.85. Great.

Pretty best than inflation, I would imagine. Yeah. So a gas company, you know the biggest loser that I've seen in this detailed, Charles, in the budget, 2023. Defense. They're spending nearly 20 billion implementing the aim of the strategic, a defense strategic review. 9 million for Rooka subs, 4.1 billion for long-range strike capabilities. 3.8 billion for defense bases in Australia's. and 400 mil for bonuses to attract defence personnel, according to the Herald.

That's not nearly... I thought they were going to get hundreds, hundreds of billions. That's a massive loss. Yes, you're right. What's the government doing? The living is vulnerable. Peter Dutton wouldn't have done that. He would have put hundreds of billions towards that.

He would have created jobs and then forced dull bludges to work in them. Isn't that what he's going to do? Everyone on Jobseeker has to work if he says so, is from what I understand. Possibly as an OPEC. Hang on, could I just understand? they're putting aside $400 million to attract more employees. For defence. That's what they're doing.

So, hey, why do they get a payroll? Why, I don't understand. Like, why does everyone else not get wage increase? But they do. It's not a wage increase, Charles. It's a bonus. It's a signing bonus, I presume. So you should join the ADF.

Yes, I'm going to become a, um, a. Sargent, what would I be, a major? A private. A private. I think you start at the bottom. Yeah, you've got to start at the bottom. Yeah, you've got to do all the hazing. You've got to receive the hazing.

Yeah, that's right. I hope part of the 400 million is going towards hazing supplies, you know, ropes type of people up and the petrol dump people in nowhere. Yeah. That's what they mean by bonus. It's on bonus. We're also spending, we're spending $3.4 billion on a, on an advanced strategic capabilities accelerator

to try and make Australia's Defence Force technologies catch up with our strategic rivals. $3.4 billion isn't going to be a drop in the ocean? Are you kidding me? I reckon what we should do instead is just ask ChatGPT to come up with our defence strategy. What a good idea.

Because I think... I presume Chat Chapti T came up with most of the budget. It does feel like that, doesn't it? Like, can you write me a budget that on the surface seems like it's good, but then when you look at the detail, none of it is any good at all. And that's exactly what JETGPT would be good at, wouldn't it?

It'd be this confident-sounding thing. We'll increase job seeker, we'll solve climate change, we'll tax gas companies, and then you look into it. I mean, this is what Ross Gittins was saying about it, was that it goes a very little way towards solving a lot of problems. It gives everybody a little bit of what they want, but doesn't do anything too radical or different. And this is the thing, Charles, about having a Labor Prime Minister

and a Prime Minister from the Labour left. And Albaugh doesn't get the credit for this. He's a full-on chest-beating, Tory-fighting, lefty Labour Prime Minister. He has values and passion and beliefs. He fights for the little guy. He grew up in Council Housing. I don't know if we've mentioned this before, but he did. He understands what it's like to not know where your next dollar is coming from.

and this is the most he felt he could do for traditional left-wing labour values. Just slightly getting a little bit more money out of gas companies with an accounting trick. That's what you get. If it had been the labour right, he wouldn't have even tried. It wouldn't have been bothered with the accounting trick. Yes, you're right.

Certainly wouldn't have increased job seeker by $2 a week or whatever it is. Well, that's probably the most depressing thing about this whole budget is that this is probably the best that we can hope for. Is that what they're trying to do? They're trying to depress it. You know where I think the surpluses come from. I think I've worked it out. Where?

The surpluses come from the massive amount that Alba has sold out. He's sold out so much. He got like $4 billion extra. Well done to him. So Peter Dutton has to give the reply to this, I think, tonight. Yes. The speech in reply, where can he go? What's left for him to do?

What coalition priority hasn't been funded? in this budget. It's an amazing pincer movement. I think he's, no, no, I think he's already hinted at

what I think is a genius strategy. Oh yeah. Which is he actually came out on Wednesday morning and said, look, actually the government deserves a bit of credit

for putting the budget into surplus. If I was him, I would just go full tilt and endorse the budget. So this is the budget that I would have done. Amazing. And then,

and then, imagine the drop in the poll numbers for Alba if Dutton came out and supported it. The Dutton curse. Yes. Oh my gosh. The government would be toast. I think that that's what's going to happen.

You know the other thing Peter Dutton could do if he really wanted to look like an absolute winner of an opposition leader? If you want people to talk about Dutton as the greatest opposition leader in Australian history, there's already talk about him being replaced by Susan Lee. I don't know whether you've heard those rumours. Yeah. What a fantastic... one week of Susan Lee and people would be calling for Dutton back, wouldn't they?

I love it. Yeah, just literally tonight he announces, I'm standing down, Susan Lee is taking over. Have a go. Suddenly Dutton's poll numbers saw. Got a lot to look forward to there. But the thing is, though, it's also worth bearing a mind that this budget hasn't done anything about the stage three tax cuts. So even if Dutton's behind in the polls, as a high-income earner, as a person with a great

personal wealth, all those childcare centres that he and his family, owns. He's going to be better off overall, isn't he? He's going to be richer than he is now. Yes. Plus, also the $160 million or so that they've allocated to more pay for politicians. Oh, that's the other thing that they snuck into the budget somehow. You know, like, which includes things like travel entitlements, because at the moment, they have to tough it. I think they only get $395 a night for staying away from home. That's a, I mean, these are, that's only, that's these days that's only four and a half-star accommodation, Charles. Yeah, I know, exactly.

I mean, they're basically homeless. Well, I'm going to go out. I'm going to hit the streets of Tokyo and just drinking in the admiration that the Japanese people have for Jim Chalmers and this budget. Yes, yes. Japan's very happy, you know, everyone's happy. Everyone's got what they want. Japan's delighted from what I understand by this.

And I'll catch up with you very soon. But, I mean, well done to the new government. They've made everyone happy unless you're doing it tough, in which case, yeah. I haven't done much for you, have they? There's winners and losers. So if you are doing it tough, if you don't have much money, you can't even complain because you've got a little bit more. So shut up.

Yeah, shut up. Our Gears from Road. We're part of the Iconiclass Network and shut up. Shut up, poor people. Just shut up. Stop complaining. Would you rather the government gave you nothing? Would you rather that, would you?