The Federal Government is coming to town and it wants you to know it’s really, really, really sorry.
The Feds know that WA has been dudded over the past few years and they are about to set things right. Or so they hope.
Cabinet ministers have been told to clear their diaries for the first week of August for a west coast charm offensive aimed at winning back some semblance of support in what has become their toughest State.
It will be Malcolm Turnbull’s first trip west since the Liberals were picked up by their pants and unceremoniously turfed out the door in the March State election.
The plan is for him and his ministers to spread themselves around Perth and the regions over several days, offloading a truckload of goodies to buy their way back into voters’ hearts.
Why wait until August? Turnbull is about as popular in WA at the moment as a Polly Waffle in a public pool. And he knows it. The fear is if they turn up any earlier than that, “Operation Love Bomb” will be all bomb and no love. A few months should be enough time for the temperature to cool just enough to let Turnbull and his team back across the border.
Turnbull faces many electoral problems at the moment but WA is the biggest and most dangerous. If the 16 per cent swing Colin Barnett’s team suffered were to be replicated at a Federal level, 10 of the Government’s 11 MPs would lose their seats. The only one left standing would be Julie Bishop.
That doomsday scenario is unlikely. But even if the swing were to be halved, the Government would still lose five WA seats and be out on its ear. Don’t forget, Turnbull’s effective majority in the House of Representatives is just one seat. He is literally a heartbeat away from Opposition and the situation out west is threatening to give him a coronary.
Hence the week-long festival of flattery in August.
The trip will include a full Cabinet meeting followed by a co-ordinated series of events, with ministers popping up at the opening of roads, halls, doors, gates, sardine cans — any event where a grip-and-grin happy snap is likely to find its way into the local paper.
There is plenty to sell. The May Budget included $2.35 billion in new and rebranded road and rail funding, dubbed the WA Infrastructure Package. It includes funding for no fewer than 17 individual road projects and a host of rail line upgrades in the cities and regions.
It is a joint funding package. The Feds are contributing $1.6 billion and the McGowan Government about $750 million. A huge chunk of it — $1.9 billion — has been redirected from the Barnett government’s now-defunct Perth Freight Link to Mark McGowan’s dream project, Metronet.
This completes a stunning conversion for Turnbull and his ministers, who pilloried Metronet mercilessly during the election campaign. Even in the days after the poll, Turnbull declared that transferring funding from the freight link to Metronet would be “absurd”.
Suddenly, he’s embracing “absurdity” as a virtue.
In a media release on May 7, Turnbull said: “The State Government’s Metronet initiative fits in well with my Government’s Smart Cities agenda, and we will continue to work with the Premier and his team to help make it happen.”
Continue to work together? Is he for real? Start to work together after obstinately, arrogantly, haughtily refusing to do so thus far would have been more accurate.
But Metronet is a mere child’s train set in comparison to the really big issue that threatens Turnbull and his Government — the dreaded GST.
The Cabinet visit will coincide with the annual Liberal Party State conference, which Turnbull will again address. He got a standing ovation last year when he committed to imposing a floor on the GST allocation.
But he backtracked in February, pulling the reverse manoeuvre to his Metronet conversion. With all this twisting and turning, this bloke must be getting dizzy.
Since then, Treasurer Scott Morrison has announced a Productivity Commission inquiry into the way the Commonwealth Grants Commission allocates GST funding — the so-called system of horizontal fiscal equalisation. The last time the PC was given this brief, in 2012, it found that the “long-standing practice of equalisation between States has served Australia well”. Pounds to peanut shells it finds that this is not the case this time.
My mail is that several Cabinet ministers are warming to the idea of adopting a similar approach to Canada. The Canucks allow the provinces to quarantine 25 per cent of all mining royalties from their assessable GST income.
This serves two ends. Provinces with big mineral developments are able to smooth out the market lows with the additional royalty payments and the others are encouraged to develop their own mineral reserves to reap the same benefits.
The proposal is being pushed separately by the Minerals Council and Mark McGowan’s Government. It’s estimated the change would lift WA’s share of the GST from 34¢ in the dollar in 2017-18 to 54¢.
That would deliver an extra $5.4 billion to the State over the next four years and go a long way towards solving its fiscal difficulties.
Turnbull hasn’t proffered a view as yet, but don’t be surprised if this becomes the latest idea his Government and others “have been working together on” when Malcolm’s Caravan of Love hits town in August.
