Labor cannot set the Coalition’s course from the grave.

By Gary Scarrabelotti

The Gillard government is dead and its budget should die with it. The next government needs to start with a clean slate.  

The Leader of the Opposition, Tony Abbott, and Shadow Treasurer, Joe Hockey, should make no — repeat no — pre-election undertakings to preserve Wayne Swan’s last ever budget. They need to face down Julia Gillard’s banshee rhetoric and bury her and Swan along with their “legacy”. 

There is something dodgy and deeply offensive about this budget and the government that made it. The Gillard government has failed to govern, so it has designed a budget in the hope of compelling a future Coalition government to run a Labor government in its place.

The proposed cuts to existing expenditure and the new major outlays – Gonski and national disability insurance – mostly kick in long after the death and burial, in a few months, of this chronically dysfunctional government. 

This is a budget that the entire Gillard government knows it will never be called upon to implement and never have to answer for. Even the budget’s opening of a long needed attack upon middle class welfare cannot be accounted to the government’s credit except according to a theological calculus about the merits of death bed conversions. 

Will Abbott cop it sweet? 

He shouldn’t. How Abbott reacts to the 2013 – 14 Budget will provide the greatest test of his statesmanship so far. 

A’gonski 

Abbott can start showing what he is made of by spelling out, here and now, that Gonski is a’gonski. That’s $6.7 billion saved over six years. 

Anyway, Gonski is irrelevant. The Commonwealth should not add a dollar to existing outlays on schools funding and it should start paring back. 

What we need is better-educated teachers and voucher-funded, community-controlled schools. 

Abbott and Hockey need to face down Julia Gillard’s banshee rhetoric and bury her and Swan along with their “legacy”.

School boards should hire and fire principals and school principals should hire and fire the teachers. Curricula should be set by individual schools. And, en passant, the teachers’ unions should be de-fanged. 

Now these are state issues. The commonwealth ought to butt out.  If the states need more money for better school facilities, and for better salaries and higher quality training for teachers, then the states should go to their voters with proposals to raise the necessary. 

With the voters in control of their own schools, the dialogue between state governments and The People over school funding should be illuminating indeed. 

Disability Insurance

The Coalition can vote, with a clear conscience, for almost anything that Gillard brings into the House, prior to the election, on disability insurance, though with this important caveat: that the funding mechanism and eligibility criteria will be subject to review by the Coalition in government and after it has conducted an audit of the federal budget. 

Disability insurance is a genuinely great concept.  But it has to be operated within a new paradigm of much smaller government targeting those services it offers only at those who cannot bear the burden of caring for themselves.

Baby bonus

Labor has done the Coalition a favour by abolishing the Howard-Costello baby bonus. Abbott should say as little as possible about this matter. The reform yields $10.6 billion in savings on welfare over a decade.  It’s not to be sneezed at and illustrates just how much fat there is in the Commonwealth’s budget.

One of the best ways of encouraging people to have babies – and for mum’s to stay home and care for them — is for the state to take its hands out of The Peoples’ pockets. The way ahead here is to tax families (mum, dad, and the kids) as a unit with an impost on household income that decreases as the number in the family increases.

Health funding 

As my esteemed colleague Lyle Dunne has wittily pointed out on this blog, the Medicare levy does not fund our system of national health insurance.  And, as the Budget itself confirms, the increased levy is not going to fund the new disability insurance régime either. 

A Coalition government should be looking to abolish the Medicare levy and to replace it with a system of compulsory contributions to a new system of health saving accounts (HSAs). 

If it is responsible to save towards your retirement, it is surely responsible to save toward your health insurance.  HSA’s should be combined with a “patient co-contribution charge” for every medical consultation. Bulk billing should be abolished except for the genuinely poor. 

The challenge 

The real issue confronting the Coalition as it contemplates this present budget and its nearness to political power is this: is the Coalition going to be a Labor government in disguise? 

Or is the Coalition going to favour smaller government, greater freedom and responsibility for families and individuals, greater decentralisation of power to the states and local governments — including the obligation to raise taxes — and greater scope for private entrepreneurship? 

One thing for sure, when Scarra Blog goes to vote at the next federal election it won’t be casting its vote in favour of a corporate state guided and managed by “conservative” hands.