Will voters see through the post-budget spin?

By ABC's Barrie Cassidy Friday 15 May 2015

Photo: This week, the Government's task was to explain why there had been such a dramatic shift in budget strategy. (AAP: Lukas Coch)

Just as Labor refuses to accept any responsibility for the fiscal handicap the country now faces, the Government resolutely refuses to concede that its performance on debt and deficit is no better, writes Barrie Cassidy.

Journalists who submit themselves year in and year out to a six-hour lockup on budget day are at their most positive on the night itself.

Once trapped inside those committee rooms, they are a captive audience force fed the controlled information flow from the government and the bureaucracy. And there's a lot of it.

Then after they have had an hour or so to absorb the material, the treasurer wanders through, massaging and honing the message. Paul Keating and Peter Costello were the best persuaders in the business, though one-on-one Joe Hockey and Wayne Swan are formidable as well.

Finally - at 7.30pm precisely - they re-enter the real world, all of a sudden exposing themselves to a more sceptical media on the outside; program hosts looking for an angle; a social media that takes over the agenda; an opposition attacking everything from the trivial to the substantial; and scores of interest groups literally lining up in the corridors to put their own spin on things.

In short, within hours perspectives change.

And then the next critical test kicks in - the government's own marketing across the wider media.

Video: Tony Abbott speaks to AM. (ABC News)

This week, the task of ministers was to try to explain to the public why there had been such a dramatic shift in strategy and direction; why a budget that demanded sacrifices last year could so quickly be superseded by one so friendly. That, and why there was no longer any talk of a debt and deficit disaster when the numbers hadn't seemed to change much at all.

And within that framework ministers needed to persuade voters that the Government had a credible trajectory back to surplus.

That task was never going to be easy, especially when the Government got the economics right last year, but screwed up the politics, and then appeared to do the opposite this year.

And sure enough the degree of difficulty has been beyond most of them, at least up until now.

Too much of it sounds like dodgy salesmanship; much of it reeks of humbug; and the public is probably on to it.

Just as Labor refuses to accept any responsibility for the fiscal handicap the country now faces, the Government resolutely refuses to concede that its performance on debt and deficit is no better.

Take this exchange between the Prime Minister and Michael Brissenden on AM.

PM: Under the former government, expenditure grew at 3.6 per cent real every year. Under this Government, it's growing at 1.5 per cent real.

Brissenden: ...the 3 per cent figure is a 10 year MYEFO figure that includes the NDIS. Your 1.5 per cent that you're quoting is a four-year figure that doesn't include the NDIS.

PM: The 3.6 per cent real is what Labor spent over its time in office...

Brissenden: Yeah, but it's a 10-year forecast.

PM: And the 1.5 per cent real is what we're spending over the forward estimates.

Brissenden: It's apples and oranges though.

PM: I don't accept that, Michael.

End of story then.

Just half an hour earlier the Prime Minister had gone through the same routine with Karl Stefanovic on The Today Show.

PM: They were spending at a rate of 3.6 per cent a year. We are spending at a rate of 1.5 per cent per year.

Stefanovic: Our spending is the same as when we went through the GFC or just slightly lower - that is still a lot of spending.

PM: What we are doing Karl, is getting the deficit down every year...

Stefanovic: But still the spending is astronomical.

PM: It's coming down, that's the point.

Leigh Sales on 7.30 came up against the same resistance when she interviewed the Treasurer, Joe Hockey.

Sales: The Government's spending as a percentage of GDP is 25.9 per cent. That is the same as the previous Labor Government (was) spending at the height of the global financial crisis.

Hockey: Not true. They got to 26 per cent.

Sales: You're at 25.9 per cent!

Semantics.

The approach is not that far removed from the spin out of the intergenerational report that allowed the Prime Minister to claim the Coalition had already halved Labor's debt and deficit - "going forward".

Maybe Australians don't know when their legs are being pulled. We'll see.

Barrie Cassidy is the presenter of the ABC program Insiders. He writes a weekly column for The Drum.

Will voters see through the post-budget spin? - The Drum (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)