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Another day, another socialist Labor government buying votes with other people’s money. Western Australia’s latest budget is a textbook case of socialist vote-buying dressed up as compassion. Premier Roger Cook and Treasurer Rita Saffioti have delivered an $3.5 billion surplus, fattened by a massive $9.3 billion GST windfall and mining royalties. Rather than banking the gains, paying down debt, or delivering structural reform, they’re spraying it around like confetti in an election year.
Including handing out cash like the Joker in Tim Burton’s Batman (1989): “Hubba, hubba, hubba! Money, money, money! Who do you trust? Me? I’m giving away free money!”
Cost-of-living relief – including a $100 fuel credit for every driver’s licence holder – is on its way for Western Australians as part of a nearly $200m plan to help with rising petrol costs.
That’s nearly $200 million of West Australians’ own money, ‘generously’ handed back to them one penny at a time, to “help with rising petrol costs”. Fuel costs that are in large part rising due to successive Labor governments’ demented ‘climate’ policies. Don’t believe the narrative about the Iran war: Australia is so rich in energy resources that we should be laughing off the Iran war. Instead, we’ve been landed with a conga-line of cretins who’ve closed down all but two of our refineries – and now, the government is reduced to going cap-in-hand to Asia, to beg for fuel.
The cash splash doesn’t end there. Families with schoolkids get student assistance payments: $150 per primary child and $250 per high schooler. Throw in free public transport on Sundays, seniors off-peak and school travel, and the government claims households with two children will pocket over $2,000 in ‘relief’.
Sound familiar? It’s the same sleight-of-hand Canberra’s Jim Chalmers is running federally: take your money through taxes and royalties, hand back a fraction of it with great fanfare and then demand gratitude at the ballot box. As I recently wrote, on federal Labor’s similar cash splash, this is robbing Peter to buy Paul’s vote with Peter’s own money.
But Opposition Leader Basil Zempilas said the government had the resources but had spent the past decade making the wrong decisions, leaving Western Australians no better off.
This is the damning part: WA governments have very long form on this. Mining booms deliver windfall gains: Labor governments treat them as an unlimited credit card for re-election bribes. The private sector drove 86 per cent of the state’s economic growth and a 27 per cent rise over five years, yet the spoils go to targeted handouts that do little for the underlying cost-of-living pressures: power bills, water rates, rego fees and housing. Zempilas nailed it: the $100 fuel “smokescreen” won’t help families sleeping in cars or buckling under the housing crisis.
The big spending continues: $9 billion over four years on health, including new hospitals and a Perth cancer centre and $4.7 billion into housing initiatives to unlock land and build thousands of homes, including ‘social and affordable stock’. In other words, the same socialist distortion of the housing market which inevitably drives up prices even higher.
Then there’s billions more on infrastructure. Ask Victorians how that one is going to work out.
This is classic Labor economics: boom-time surpluses fund election-year giveaways – deficits and debt are for someone else to worry about. The state boasts the ‘most affordable debt in the nation’, now forecast $4 billion lower at $34.5 billion. But history shows these windfalls vanish quickly once the mining cycle turns or the handouts become entrenched expectations. If China sneezes, WA will be hospitalised with pneumonia – only to find the ambulances ramped up around the block.
Cook and Saffioti talk up WA as the strongest economy in the nation. Fair enough… for now. The private sector and resources are carrying the load. But mining, WA’s one and only money-spinner, has seen a sustained decline in productivity. Perth would do well to study Detroit’s catastrophic decline.
The brutal fact is that the budget does little for the fundamentals hurting ordinary West Australians: housing supply constraints, cost-of-living fundamentals beyond one-off credits and the long-term fiscal discipline needed when the next downturn hits.
As with federal Labor’s cash offsets and broken promises on negative gearing, this is not relief. It’s pre-election patronage. Give the punters a pittance of their own money back, hope they forget the broader pressures and cruise to another term.
