Forty years ago this week, ambitious 42-year-old Labor treasurer Paul Keating warned that Australia risked becoming a "banana republic".

Subscribe now for unlimited access.

Login or signup to continue reading

That 1986 wake-up call shocked Australia into accepting the opportunity-based policies that turned it into one of the world's most affluent nations. Good policy is good politics, Keating insisted.

Today's ambitious 48-year-old Labor treasurer Jim Chalmers promotes bigger government and higher taxes that will drain national prosperity, including from the next generation of Australians who his fifth budget claims to help.

Yet, amid the potential for further national self-harm, the disappointment of today's slow-motion banana republic process will prompt pressure for correction.

Such a correction came three weeks before Chalmers' budget when Health Minister Mark Butler confessed that Labor's $52 billion National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) was "broken".

The Labor-left minister revealed that the out-of-control NDIS roll was on track to expand from 760,000 people to "well over" 900,000 by 2030.

But he sensationally declared that Labor instead would slash the demand-driven NDIS to 600,000 people by 2030. Imagine if Scott Morrison had forced more than 300,000 Australians off Labor's haloed disability scheme.

On Tuesday night, however, Chalmers allocated just one bland sentence to his budget's biggest "savings" measure by far - $37.8 billion over the forward estimates and $184.9 billion over the next 10 years.

It is the modern banana republic spending cut - sorry, "saving" - that Labor has to have; because its poorly designed "care economy" scheme is so ridden with everyday fraud that it threatens to devour the government's entire agenda.

Smashing the NDIS helps Chalmers finance his $250 Working Australia Tax Offset while forecasting a budget surplus a decade from now.

Even with this eye-watering policy correction, however, Chalmers' budget still entrenches post-pandemic........

© Canberra Times