Federal Treasurer Scott Morrison will be handing down his budget on Tuesday.
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And there’s every chance it will be a bit of an anti-climax for the people of the Illawarra.
That’s not because we’ll be left out – last week Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull visited Nowra and trumpeted the fact that there would be $155 million in the budget for the new Shoalhaven River crossing.
Granted, that’s not in the Illawarra but plenty of us drive down to Nowra and have to drive across those bridges over the Shoalhaven River.
A four-lane bridge would be a great benefit – as long as those drivers who seem compelled to drive over the bridges at 10-15km/h under the speed limit all keep to the left lane (if only the treasurer could do something about them as well).
The budget has the potential to be an anticlimax because of the modern-day political habit of spilling the beans about all the big funding commitments in the week before.
These are often referred to as “budget leaks” but, really, we doubt you can call it a leak when it’s actually an MP announcing the funding promise because the boss told him to.
Part of the reason they do it is to spread out the good news, to ensure the party in power gets several days of positive media coverage out of the budget rather than confining it all to just one day.
That can bit a bit of a false economy because it sets up budget night itself to be a bit of a letdown.
The politicians go and spend the last week spruiking about all the money in the budget that will be spent in a certain area that, when the treasurer officially releases the budget papers on Tuesday night there’s no surprises.
Also because politicians of all stripes see this pre-announcing as really beneficial to them we just assume that they don’t leave any big funding announcements for Tuesday night.
Basically, if we didn’t hear that we got it before Tuesday, then chances are that we’re not going to get it.
This means the focus on budget night becomes more about what we didn’t get, and also on where the government is cutting back on things.
Maybe it’s about time the politicians went back to waiting until Tuesday night before telling us where they’re spending all of our taxpayer dollars.
