Nothing reveals your real priorities better than the way you spend money.
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That's why the coming budget - Anthony Albanese's first real budget, after a quick nip and tuck last year - will provide the definitive yardstick against which to measure Labor.
It's a long time before the next election, so this is the party's best opportunity to roll out a program to change the country. In other words, this will be the definitive guide revealing the party's ambition (or the lack of it) and who it's really want's to please. So far that's been difficult to tell.
Remember back when before the election Labor hinted it might reverse the Coalition's steep fee hikes for humanities degrees? Well, it hasn't. In fact the only hint so far about changes to education spending so far have been the reverse of cuts.
Treasurer Jim Chalmers is linking HECS to inflation, making sure the cost of the loans is borne by the people who are receiving them. The loan's interest rate will rise, in stages, to a massive 7 per cent - a clear admission by Treasury that inflation isn't headed back to its target range.
This is a regressive measure. The wealthy will pay off the kids' debts early, but the poor? Well, they'll be slugged with ever-growing debt. Pensions, however, are going to remain fixed.
Landlords, meanwhile, will be able to continue collecting growing rents on their ever expanding, negatively geared property portfolios while the poor are saddled with compounding interest debts for life.
Oh and yes, Albanese (who studied for free) does own rental property of his own.
And then, just when you're becoming really depressed about this government's lack of ambition, comes news of a tiny, $10 million (yes, that's an m not a b) program to establish a roving team of shiny-bottomed accountants in Treasury.
What makes these bureaucrats different, however, is that they'll be polishing their posteriors twisting and turning in excitement as they run slide-rules and gather data on all those other, hugely expensive spending programs to see if they actually work.
Imagine that! Objective evidence to test the efficacy of government! You can see why it's been funded in such a miserly way.
The idea is backed by detailed analysis from the Committee for Economic Development of Australia. Senior economist Cassandra Winzar conducted a deep dive into a series of major spending programs that have been rolled out to extensive fanfare over past decades.
This revealed what will be a possibly unsurprising fact to many readers of this column: the government has absolutely no idea what works. What's even more critical is that it has no simple way of getting a program back on track once it's started going off the rails.
The Australian National Audit Office does have the capacity to reveal problems. The problem with these is the investigations almost inevitably take place in an adversarial setting.
The government program has already been rolled out and everyone that implemented it wants to show how brilliantly it works. Audits do result in packages of "recommendations", however the chance of these being implemented without change in the original drivers of the programs - both political and personality - is virtually negligible.
What will supposedly make this Treasury team different is that it will work alongside the department as the program is being rolled out.
It creates not an oversight team as much as a collaborative structure that aims to keep the program on track and ensure it's actually delivering on its original aims.
Take, for example, the cashless debit card that supposedly encourages responsible spending by preventing government handouts being spent on gambling or booze. Everybody's had a say about this and it's either been an unmitigated disaster or an unadulterated good.
Marcia Langton, who was on the original committee recommending its introduction called the card a "brutal abuse of the poor" while Dan Tehan, the unimaginative minister who implemented a very different card insists it is "making a real difference".
The truth quickly disappears in a rapidly escalating ideological battle and any chance of reforming or salvaging the original idea is quickly lost. If this team works as designed it will give ministers a chance to act preemptively and intervene to ensure programs stay on track.
This, at least, is the hope of Assistant Treasurer Andrew Leigh.
While in opposition the former professor (who seemingly has another life given to churning out popular economics bestsellers) pushed this excellent idea, the only disappointing element of which is the small budget allocated to it. This is really exactly the type of program you'd expect a genuinely reforming government to be championing - although perhaps this also explains why it's so lacking in ambition.
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Nobody likes to be told how to do their job, especially by someone who can see how to do it better. And some ideas aren't really expected to ever make sense anyway; they're such political boondoggles that the only real justification seems to be buying votes.
Just take a government program Leigh's team will never be allowed to examine, the huge dollop of money being thrown to a tiny number of AFL fans in Hobart.
Albanese's somehow found money to assist in getting a waterfront football stadium off the ground.
Unfortunately subsidence around the chosen site means this sum is just a (very) rough guess at what the eventual cost will turn out to be. There's a good chance cost blowouts will see the eventual cost soar higher than the most brilliant goalkicker. But hey, think of how happy the population of 252,000 will be when they can watch a game at home and Albanese can proclaim he's the "infrastructure Prime Minister".
Or, as others might say, "yesterday's man".
There won't, however, be any money for Canberra Stadium (population 460,000) in the budget. The big difference seems to be electors in Hobart voted for an independent, instead of Labor.
Maybe that's the way to grab the government's attention.
Caesar kept the crowd happy by providing bread and circuses and there's no hint that this budget will be any different.
- Nicholas Stuart is editor of ability.news and a regular columnist.
Nicholas Stuart
Nicholas Stuart is a Canberra writer.
Nicholas Stuart is a Canberra writer.
