Treasurer Jim Chalmers visits Herald journalists during the budget lock-up on May 9.Credit:Rhett Wyman
Some journos love the ritual. I confess to being swept up in theatre of the lockup when I covered my first federal budget in 2011. But I now find the whole thing bizarre. The truth is the lockup has outlived its use-by date,for two reasons.
The first is that the practice is primarily an exercise in public relations management. Governments of all persuasions know this and have benefited from it. A key problem for media is that the budget’s 7.30pm delivery makes it extremely difficult to seek meaningful reaction from interest groups and the public before deadline. TheHerald has very little capacity to gather reaction before the next day’s newspaper is sent to the printing press,and the 6pm television news bulletins are long finished by the time the treasurer rises to his feet in the House of Representatives.
The second reason is that governments now strategically release details of most measures in the weeks leading up to budget day to make sure they get as much coverage as possible. The concept is simple:a budget contains so much information that if it were to all be handed down at once,some of the goodies contained in it would risk being overlooked.
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This year,information was published ahead of the budget about thesurprise surplus this financial year,anincrease to the JobSeeker rate,changes tosingle parent payments,newenergy bill rebates,pharmacy reforms allowing Australians to buy twice as many common medicines for the price of one script,a much-needed $535 millionfunding injection for national cultural institutions such as the National Gallery of Australia,a $3.3 billiontobacco excise hike,and adecrease in government interest repayments from a forecast $96 billion between 2022-23 and 2025-26 to a slightly improved $86 billion.
TheHerald’s terrific team in the Parliament House press gallery have a great track record of finding out budget information for themselves and disrupting the carefully crafted media matrix of the government of the day. A good example this year wasan exclusive story that the budget would include changes to increase revenue from the Petroleum Resources Rent Tax.
Labor is not the only offender here. The Coalition also strategically released information ahead of budgets to maximise coverage. But it really is time for the current government to have a hard think about the approach,and whether we should just do away with sham lockups.