Every Type of Australian Voter the Government Doesn't Care About, Ranked

This time of year brings out the worst in people; in our leaders, our political pundits, and the media outlets that publish them. By the time you get to reading this, you have probably already read countless federal budget “winners and losers” lists, as if there could be any winners under this government to begin with. Even the cohorts who think of themselves as “winners” are, in fact, losers. All of them. Every year. 

In fact, those who lose the most are often forgotten about as voter sets or constituencies altogether. Ignored, priced out, time-poor, money-poor, with probably less than a single care to be given about how the Morrison government plans to spend its money. The government isn’t thinking about them – why should they think about the government?

And so we bring to you this: The Australians who Prime Minister Scott Morrison cares about least, based on how his government has allocated federal funds, from least… to kind of least. 

SO LITTLE CARES THEY MIGHT AS WELL NOT EXIST: ANYONE WHO HASN’T ALREADY ACCUMULATED OR INHERITED HOARDS OF WEALTH.

This group is really just “most people” – made up largely by the four in five Australians who earn less than $100,000 a year (“middle income earners”) with a life expectancy beyond the next decade. 

Swathes of the country, utterly stiffed. So stiffed that Treasury doesn’t have projections for when the budget will be back “in the black”. Perpetual debt caused by irreverent corporate welfare. 

This debt will be taken on by people who earn/have next to nothing (and will soon be taxed the same, in some cases, as people who earn four times the amount they do). It is expected to reach 31.1 percent of GDP by June next year (or, $714.9 billion) before it peaks at nearly one third of GDP come 2025. 

A lot of this debt saved a lot of jobs and lined the pockets of crowd favourite capitalistas like Harvey Norman through the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. But also just a lot of debt for little in return.

ONLY REALLY SPOKEN ABOUT BECAUSE THE GOVERNMENT FEARS THE LOSS OF ONSHORE CAPITAL: THE ENVIRONMENT.

After shamelessly denying the ruin Australia’s fossil fuels industry is causing the environment for the last decade, proudly on the world stage in Glasgow at the end of last year, and then continuing to do so while committing to meaningless climate targets while his country has become an uninhabitable made-to-order freak weather catchment, Morrison has continued to wind down climate change mitigation spending. 

The better part of a year has passed and the Coalition has yet to shed any light on how it plans to get to net zero emissions by 2050. This budget, unsurprisingly, wasn’t any different. It included a $247 million commitment to private sector hydrogen investments (bad), along with $148 million for microgrid projects (localised power grids that run separately from the mains, in most cases powered by renewables, but unclear in this instance) in regional areas, and a generous $50 million for gas infrastructure (also, bad).

NEVER A WINNER DESPITE OWNING THE LAND ON WHICH THESE GOVERNMENTS STAND: AUSTRALIA’S FIRST NATIONS PEOPLE.

We’ll start with what is in it: a $636.4 million spend on Indigenous rangers to expand land and sea management on Country, in a bid to bolster education and employment opportunities in remote and regional Australia. 

The Morrison government has also spent an additional $408 million on housing for remote communities in the Northern Territory. 

Then there’s a $183 million splash on improving “economic, social, and health outcomes” for Indigenous Territorians. There’s just under $220 million for Indigenous health programs; $131.4 million on jobs and training; and $3.9 million for justice and court assistance.

But, in real terms, First Nations legal services, Aboriginal family violence prevention and legal services, have all been cut.

PITCHED AS A WINNER FOLLOWING 2020 WORKPLACE HARASSMENT REVELATIONS BUT, ALSO, NOT REALLY NOW (OR EVER, UNDER THIS GOVERNMENT) A WINNER: WOMEN.

Those who spent Tuesday evening watching Frydenberg’s 2022-23 Budget speech live will likely remember the Treasurer lower his voice, slow his cadence to a solemn hush, and announce the addition of Trodelvy, a medication used to treat a rare form of breast cancer, to the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS). 

It’s difficult to see this, along with almost every other measure levelled at women by the Morrison government, as anything other than a play for their votes after years of dismissal and demonisation. Why wasn’t the medicine already included in the PBS?

 The same argument could probably be made for the $58 million investment made by the Morrison government into endometriosis, which will include $16 million for a specialised clinic in each state and territory, $25 million to cover the cost of MRIs under Medicare, and an extra –here’s the kicker – $5 million to establish an Endometriosis Management Plan to support women who suffer at the hands of the disease. 

For a disease that cripples more than 11 percent of Australian women, and accounts for roughly 15 of every 1,000 hospitalisations among women between the ages of 15 and 44 across the country, it is again difficult to think of the combined spending as anything more than a shrewd election play, crystalised by Frydenberg’s failure to correctly pronounce endometriosis on national television. 

I won’t waffle on, for obvious reasons, and others have made the point far better than I could.

NOT NEWS, BUT ANYWAY: EVERYONE UNDER THE AGE OF 25.

There are drips and drops, upon which you could probably mount an abstract argument for the Morrison government’s consideration of young people – like the new apprenticeship scheme – but really there isn’t much to get you going. 

Some mental health funding ($500 million) has been shoehorned into a kinda-nothing package for this group of nobodies, as with the extension of the government’s first home buyers scheme that might help young people so rich they probably have no friends and would reinstall the Morrison government to power in May anyway.

Other than that, you could probably chalk this budget up as a loss and consider moving somewhere where wage growth is on the uptick and housing is slightly less unaffordable. Try Luxembourg or Finland.

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