NICOLA SMITH: Labor deploys its sweetest talker Jim Chalmers to sell Budget narrative

Labor on Tuesday will aim to sell its cost-of-living narrative to voters with a rare fourth Federal Budget that will set the course for an election campaign that may kick off as early as this weekend.

With the spotlight firmly on the nation’s Parliament, the highly orchestrated presentation of the Budget is traditionally the Treasurer’s moment to shine, and that role is unlikely to pass to the Prime Minister even though Australia is on the cusp of the poll.

The exact timing of Anthony Albanese’s election call may hang on how well Labor’s economic story lands this week and the robustness of the Opposition’s Budget response.

On Monday, speculation ran through the parliament’s corridors that the Prime Minister could head to the governor-general’s house as early as Friday to trigger a poll for May 3 or May 10 if he believes the Government now has the upper hand.

The task will fall to Treasurer Jim Chalmers, who has a reputation as the Government’s best communicator, to use his platform this week to spruik a Labor’s spendathon to ease pressures on households while showcasing the party’s credentials as a responsible manager of the national purse strings.

The much-awaited budget books, due to be unveiled at 7.30pm AEDT, will be delivered against a backdrop of years of projected deficits and a splurge of recent Labor announcements on cheaper medical care, energy bill relief and infrastructure investment.

Most of Labor’s flagship economic policies have already been trailed and this week’s Budget is not expected to contain any major surprises.

After Cyclone Alfred derailed the chances of a mid-April election, the Government has seized the political momentum to build on its centrepiece cost-of-living offer in February of $8.5b in new Medicare funding to make nine out of 10 GP visits free by 2030.

It has since added $1.2 billion in disaster recovery support in Queensland and New South Wales, as well as $1.8 billion to provide another $150 of energy bill relief for every household in the nation, extending the existing rebate to the end of 2025.

It has promised PBS medicines post-election will cost a maximum of $25, down from $31.60, and increased efforts to tackle the housing crisis by expanding the income and price caps for its Help to Buy scheme to help more low- and middle-income earners onto the property ladder.

The decision to avoid an April 12 election in the wake of a weather disaster that wreaked mayhem along the east coast initially raised the question of whether the Budget presentation could damage Labor’s economic reputation by drawing attention to structural deficits stretching for the foreseeable future.

But the extra time appears to have boosted Labor’s momentum while exposing policy divides within the Coalition and internal uneasiness over Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s election strategy.

Ahead of an election that will be decided by who voters trust most on the economy, Labor could turn the focus on the Budget to its advantage by using this chance to firmly imprint its financial relief messaging in the public consciousness.

Dr Chalmers will also use the moment to promote the Government’s narrative of achieving two back-to-back surpluses in its term, while reducing inflation, keeping unemployment figures low and pushing forward with a “relief, repair and reform” agenda in a “new world of global uncertainty.”

As journalists, policy wonks and economists pour over the minutiae of budget lines, Labor will be hoping its key slogans will be the only ones sticking in voters minds.

“All voters really care about is a couple things - number one, the big picture, that everything’s going to be okay eventually, that we’re not going backwards as a nation overall, particularly economically,” said Andrew Hughes, a political communications and marketing expert at the Australian National University.

“But I think the main thing for most people is how, at a tangible and immediate level, my life can be made different,” he added.

“People need to know what immediate help they will get, and can they get that immediate help straight away,” he said, pointing to the power bill subsidy was a “really big step forward” in that regard.

For a public that was already dealing with high levels of personal debt, national deficits were less of a concern as long as it was being addressed, he argued.

But for financial experts such as EY Chief Economist, Cherelle Murphy, this week’s Budget is a missed opportunity for long overdue and substantive reform that neither of the major parties is willing to address.

“What would be ideal, is if the Government wasn’t adding a lot at all to spending unless it’s offset elsewhere,” she told The Nightly.

“That’s the starting point. And then, more importantly, putting in place reforms to really help the private sector to maximise productivity growth,” she said, pointing also to external geopolitical pressures such as trade wars that require Australia to be “match fit” for difficult times ahead.

Ms Murphy highlighted the “indiscriminate” nature of blanket cost-of-living relief than targeting things like energy bill support to those who needed it the most.

“When you’re in a deficit position and you have debt accumulating quite quickly, every dollar has to be thought about it very carefully,” she said.

“There are certainly some announcements have been made in the last few months which are clearly designed for an election campaign, which are not really going to help us out in the longer term,” Ms Murphy added.

“The crazy thing is, of course, that policies that help us out in the long term are good for the electorate. They just have to be sold as such.”

With the expected absence of new and eye-catching policies, Richard Holden, UNSW Professor of Economics, said this week’s main contest lay in who was most effective in presenting their economic management credentials.

This could be a “harder case for this Government to make about the last three years where that reputation has been justifiably called into question” by pumping money into the economy that had kept inflation and interest rates higher for longer, he argued.

But the stakes are high for Peter Dutton as he prepares to his own Budget reply amid growing calls for the Coalition to reveal the costed details of its economy policies.

Kos Samaras, director of strategy and analytics at the Redbridge Group, argued the election delay had worked in Labor’s favour as it had put the brakes on the Coalition’s pre-poll announcements.

“This will be (Dutton’s) opportunity to start talking about the economy, and he needs to get it right, because that’s what’s missing from his campaign at the moment,” he said.