Scott Morrison went to the NSW Central Coast last week bearing a large gift for the people of Gosford – confirmation that a new Australian Tax Office building would be built in the town by the Doma Group on the site of the old Gosford primary school and that it would open for business in late 2017. Mr Morrison said the new building would bring 600 jobs to the area and provide would provide a fillip for CBD businesses, restaurants and the building sector during construction. "You may know plenty of things that we've been able to stop," Mr Morrison told those present at his first official announcement as Treasurer, "whether it's stopping the carbon tax or stopping the mining tax or stopping the bank deposit tax that Labor had. Well, we're starting the jobs here on the Central Coast".
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It was a speech to warm the cockles of Lucy Wicks's heart, the Liberal member for the marginal federal seat of Robertson who was standing alongside Mr Morrison in Gosford last week. But it was also quite disingenuous: the Coalition is not starting 600 jobs on the Central Coast so much as shifting them from Canberra – and it is doing so in ways that pays little heed to budget fundamentals or the responsibility of governments to ensure best value for taxpayers' money. Such considerations were, of course, key factors in the Coalition's thinking when it announced major public sector job cuts after coming to power in 2013.
Some 8000 public service positions have been lost in Canberra since then. Other states, too, have been affected, with a number of tax offices closed in the regions, including Tasmania. Rather than take stock and examine how public sector savings might be further consolidated, however, the Coalition's attention has wandered off-script. For example, the Commonwealth continues to carry the cost of much of the office space occupied by long-departed bureaucrats, with estimates that between 70,00 and 100,000 square metres now lie fallow.
With such a large, under-utilised asset on its books, the logic of the government paying for new tax office space in Gosford looks questionable – as does paying $70 million in "dead money" to a developer when that money might have been better directed restoring the ATO's ability to assess and collect tax legally owed to the Commonwealth.
The real reason for creating expensive and unnecessary job churn within the ATO was conveyed in Mr Morrison's choice of words last week. The Coalition pledged to build a new tax office in Gosford before the 2013 election, just as it promised to stop the boats and axe the mining and carbon taxes. If the lack of any solid business case for a new ATO office in Gosford was reason enough for the Coalition to backtrack, then the deteriorating budget outlook certainly was.
Pork-barrelling is an all-too-common failing of the major political parties. Even independent MPs have stooped to it when the opportunity arose. A preparedness to impoverish Labor-voting regions in order to solicit the votes of more Coalition-friendly areas takes a particularly cynical bent, however.
