Abbott has delivered a budget for the lobbyists and Liberal donors

While Tony Abbott's ministers enjoy cigars, expensive dinners and the other perks of office, a shift is taking place in Australian politics: sick of politicians' lies, voters are deserting the major parties

Clive Palmer

The budget proves once and for all that Australians can’t trust politicians. Most Australians were already aware that they couldn’t rely on the Labor party, after the revelations from NSW over the last couple of years. Now Tony Abbott is in power, and if they can’t trust him, who can they trust? What is the point of a dishonest system?

Australians began to desert the major parties in September, when a quarter of the electorate decided to vote for another party other than Labor or the Liberals. It continued in the Western Australian senate election in April, when 46% of Western Australians voted for a party other than Labor or the Liberal party. With a swing of more than 7% against the government (minus 5% for the Liberal party and minus 2% for the National party) the government was a clear loser.The Labor vote in WA crashed to its lowest level in more than a century, with just 21.5%.

Still, the mainstream media and commentators failed to report the significance of what was happening. They were looking back and not forward. Palmer United received a swing of over 7% in the Western Australian senate election. Our vote was nearly two and a half times more than what we received in the 2013 election. Still, the establishment's heads were in the sand. They can't recognise the shift that is taking place in Australian public opinion.

Palmer United will hold the balance of power in the new senate and yet we are still routinely excluded from opinion polls in most of the national papers. This is especially true of the Newspoll in the Australian and the Galaxy Poll in the Courier Mail.

Why is this so? Is it that the owner of Newspoll or the Courier Mail didn’t like what began in September last year, or are they just too slow to understand what is happening? To many Australians, it seemed those papers were just condemning themselves to extinction as they moved out of step with the electorate.

As the government prepared its first budget, the spin doctors were working overtime, preparing for the moment when Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey would throw away the promises and the policies they took to the election. At parliament house, lobbyists queued to see ministers and bombarded new members of parliament with detailed submissions. I consigned them to the rubbish bin without reading them. When truth prevails over injustice, all Australians are winners – but on budget night the truth was nowhere to be seen.

On budget night it became clear that the Liberal party, the prime minister and the treasurer are like muppets in a theatre: all about show business rather than the needs, hopes and aspirations of the Australian people. For their part, the National party has become irrelevant. The Liberal government is happy to use its numbers in parliament but holds its members in contempt. As one minister said, “Don’t worry about the hayseeds”.

Liberal party strategy was to soften up the electorate by telling them things were bad, Australians are hopeless and the only way forward is the way set out in the budget. It doesn’t matter anyway, they thought. The voters will fall for it, they always have. This is how the game of politics works.

In the first year of government you blame the last government for everything. That way the government doesn’t have to perform, and the ministers can enjoy cigars and expensive dinners and the perks of office. After all, that’s what it’s all about. Throw in a couple of charter flights for members and everyone's happy.

The Liberals have made statements to parliament over the six months leading up to budget night about Australia's debt crisis. If something was not done (what the Liberal donors wanted), the economy would implode and everyone would suffer. This view was supported by the commission of audit.

The truth is Australia has one of the lowest debt levels in the world. Australia’s general government net debt as a percentage of GDP was 13.5% in 2013, whereas the OECD average for advanced economies was 73.5%. Australia is one of only 13 countries to have a AAA credit rating.

These facts aren't helpful to the Liberal party, so their strategy is to get the treasurer and the prime minister to repeatedly lie to parliament and the electorate. The party's spin doctors could convince the journalists, so no one would be the wiser. Even though Australia didn’t have a debt problem, Abbott would introduce a debt tax that would help convince people we had a crisis on our hands – which was clearly not true.

Abbott and Hockey have extended the age of eligibility for the old age pension to 70 years. This meant the vesting age for those with super would eventually extend too, meaning that Australians would get access to their super one hour before they died, or at a time when 30% of them had already died. But the fund managers who manage super would be happy because they would continue to make record fees for longer and the lobbyists they employed would continue to donate to the Liberal party.

They also cut $80bn in funding to the states, which will cripple their capacity to run hospitals and schools. This means they will likely be privatised and sold to businesses which could increase health and education costs ,to make huge profits and hold a monopoly over the lives of all Australians. Similarly, the introduction of a GP co-payment of $7 was devastating news for sick Australians on limited incomes, such as single mothers, pensioners and the unemployed. Liberal voters who had been loyal for over 50 years had been betrayed at the end of their life.

The rest of the electorate has been thrown on the scrap heap. An increase to the GST is being mooted, but the GST just taxes individual taxpayers, not businesses. All businesses get their GST refunded by the government, so are moves to increase the GST just about increasing taxes on Australians without them knowing it? High income women – mostly Liberal party voters – will benefit from the paid parental scheme, while stay at home mums would get nothing and women on lower wages would only get a fraction. Increased crime and increased youth suicide are also now very serious concerns, after the Abbott government took away the eligibility for young people to qualify for government assistance for six months after they were unemployed.

The government has also clawed back control over fuel excise by indexing future increases, guaranteeing that Australians will pay more every year without it being announced and without the government taking political responsibility for its decisions. John Howard’s family tax benefits were thrown out, with Howard himself confirming that a tax benefit, taken away, is a tax hike – another broken promise by Abbott.

The Abbott government's first budget delivered for the lobbyists and donors of the Liberal party. The age of entitlement has arrived. But out in the western suburbs of Melbourne, in the Hunter Valley, in Western Australia and Queensland, in New South Wales and the Northern Australia and right across the nation, the people are moving. The 46% of voters that didn’t vote for Liberal or Labor in the Western Australian election may soon be 60%. The face of power and politics in Australia may be changing forever.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/19/abbott-has-delivered-a-budget-for-the-lobbyists-and-liberal-donors