The dangers of driving with ScoMo

Scott Morrison overlooked one detail this week when he likened the task of returning the budget to surplus to hopping in the car and heading off for a summer holiday with the family.

The Treasurer was so pleased with the analogy that he trotted it out in almost every interview after Tuesday's mid-year economic forecasts revealed, for the third successive year, that the promised return to a budget surplus was at least another year away.

It was almost as if Scott Morrison needed a reassuring hand to hold. 

"There are no short cuts; there may be some delays on the way with road works and the like," Morrison mused. "There will be plenty of people in the back seat – which often happens when I'm driving the family – saying, 'Are we there yet? Are we there yet?'

Illustration: Andrew Dyson

"That's natural. But our path back to budget balance is very similar to that."

The analogy duly featured in all the TV news bulletins and in a rather flattering digital depiction of Morrison as Chevy Chase in a National Lampoon's Vacation poster on the front page of Sydney's Daily Telegraph.

The problem was this: when families load up the car and head off to the beach, they generally don't have the luxury of being able to push back their return for whatever reason – year after year, holiday after holiday.

It's a tough job: Treasurer Scott Morrison. Photo: Andrew Meares

Yet that is precisely what Morrison proposed. After Tony Abbott declared the budget emergency in 2013, the first Joe Hockey budget predicted a return to surplus in 2018-19. Hockey's second effort nominated 2019-20. Now, Morrison says 2020-21, and disbelief abounds.

"We have been on this car trip for a very long time already, and it doesn't feel like we're getting a lot closer to the destination," says the Grattan Institute's John Daley.

Not that anyone is savaging Morrison for adopting the same cautious approach taken by predecessors Hockey and Wayne Swan in the face of collapsing revenues.

"Australia's fiscal position, though it's worse than previously reported as being, is not so dire that we need to risk throwing the economy back into recession or, if that's too extreme, materially slowing it further, merely to achieve a budget surplus by a predetermined date," says economist Saul Eslake.

Tuesday's performance was arguably Morrison's most important since Malcolm Turnbull installed him as Treasurer in September, but it was hardly an unqualified success. Morrison is learning on the job and it shows.

"Generally speaking, the talk about Morrison in the community is guarded," says social researcher Hugh Mackay. "You can say of Turnbull that he hit the ground running and looked like a prime minister 10 seconds after he got the job. Morrison? Not at all."

Rather than travel to Perth to present the fiscal outlook with Finance Minister Mathias Cormann, Morrison would have been better advised to stay on the east coast and present the outlook solo, as was the practice before Hockey. It was almost as if Morrison needed a reassuring hand to hold.

Now he faces his biggest test since stopping the boats: preparing a pre-election budget in difficult circumstances, one that delivers the economic leadership that Turnbull cited as his biggest priority and Abbott's biggest shortcoming.

The differences between the two assignments are stark. To stop the boats, Morrison had an unlimited budget, could operate in secrecy and used fear and prejudice as weapons. Now funds are tight, transparency is a given and a reassuring tone is not negotiable.

"What Morrison and Turnbull have to do is to seek a mandate for some of the things that need to be done, presumably by laying out in the budget what they will do if they are re-elected, and to avoid promising not to do some of the things that need to be done," says Eslake.

But the Treasurer is hamstrung by the baggage he carries into the role.

First is the collective baggage, because Morrison was a key member of Team Abbott, which came to office promising not to do many of the things that should have been promised, then proceeded to break commitments in a manner that was universally seen as unfair. A treasurer burdened by such baggage would have been avoided had Turnbull given the job to a completely new face in the form of Christian Porter, who was treasurer in Colin Barnett's WA state government before switching to national politics. Instead, Turnbull asked Porter to fill Morrison's shoes in social security.

Second is Morrison's personal baggage. "He came into the job with two dark clouds over him," says Mackay. "One was that people associate him with the darkest, toughest, most inhumane period in the border protection saga. The other is that people doubt whether he was straight about his role in the Abbott-Turnbull transition."

There is no doubt that Morrison is one of the Coalition's strongest performers, hardest workers, best negotiators and better communicators, but he is also one of Parliament's most partisan figures, who for political gain almost single-handedly torpedoed Labor's attempts to stop the boats.

It was a bit rich then that Morrison cried foul, not once but twice, when the removal of the incentive for pathologists to bulk bill was branded a co-payment by stealth. "I think it's unhelpful to get into these sorts of political debates," he told the ABC with a straight face. "To immediately partisanise [sic] this and to immediately politicise it in those terms, I don't think is a helpful way to have a mature debate about the issue."

If one of Turnbull's early successes has been his ability to reset the tone of the conversation and move beyond sloganeering, the same cannot be said of Morrison. At least, not yet.

"He's got a slogan about working, saving and investing, and one about jobs and growth," says Eslake. "It's not like he refuses to comment on operational matters, as he did in his previous role, but he lacks nuance."

This may be a product of inexperience, and the fact that Morrison is the first person to be parachuted into the Treasury portfolio without previously having been a shadow treasurer, a finance minister or an assistant treasurer since John Kerin in 1991.

The final hurdle for Morrison is recent history and the sheer scale of the task. "This is a tough problem," says Daley. "He is now the third treasurer to grapple with this problem and it would be fair to say the last two haven't had much luck. Fiscal repair is politically really, really hard."

Deloitte Access Economics director Chris Richardson agrees, but says he is generally impressed with Morrison's start. "Am I happy with how he is going so far? Yes. Is it an horrendous time to be treasurer of Australia? Yes. Will this end happily? We don't know yet."

In the meantime, Morrison will have to deal with the scepticism of an electorate that is summed up neatly by Eslake. "If I was a kid in the back seat of his car, I'd be saying, 'Dad, I'm not sure I believe you'."

Michael Gordon is political editor of The Age.