I’m not sure who started the trend for reporting on the Federal Budget as a cutesy-two-columned clip-art heavy table of “winners” and “losers”, but they should certainly receive some sort of award for trend-setting in journalism. The format is so ubiquitous that it’s almost hard to imagine reading about the budget any other way.
And hey, I’ll be the first to admit that making the budget digestible is a mighty challenge. My hat goes off to all the poor souls who sit in lockup so I don’t have to.
Surely, though, there is a publication out there that can afford to experiment with form just a little? Surely there are clicks to be gained by boldly championing a different type of budget coverage?
Because all those winners v. losers reports are reducing you and your experience of the world down to a set of stereotypes. You’re the tradie, the parent in a young family, the first home-buyer, the holder of a self-managed-super-fund… or (more rarely in such reporting) you’re the person with a disability, the student, the aged pensioner. (Or in this bizarre take from the ABC, you may be “Economic Outlook”)
And that’s fine of course. When you’re trying to communicate with an audience of 27.2 million individuals, you’re going to need to generalise just a tad.
The problem is that the winner/loser analysis makes you either the beneficiary of government largesse or the poor embattled taxpayer. It’s “lifters and leaners” rhetoric, and it’s explicitly anti-tax and anti-government.
The visual metaphor is a contest: “winners” and “losers” is language that evokes a tug of war (or your team sport of choice). In this metaphor you are fighting with those in your team against the people in another team. Ground gained by you is lost by the other team and vice-versa.
Federal budgets are famously about choices – but we need not see those choices through the lens of a zero-sum competition where you either benefit from a government program or are unwillingly paying for it.
The truth is you are more than a walking balance-sheet. You’re a person who gets to live in this country and this world, and who benefits from a million or more tiny connections to others in your day to day life. You benefit, whether you’re conscious of it or not, from living in a society in which children get an education, sick people receive treatment, and wilderness is protected. That is in fact what taxes are: you’re paying money into the bucket our society draws on to do the things we think are worth doing.
You’re a tradie, yes, but that doesn’t mean you automatically hate spending on environment and conservation. You may not be a person with a disability, but chances are you know someone who depends on the NDIS – either as a provider or user. (Indeed – one of the lasting benefits of the NDIS may be that millions of Australians have received help for a disability, even if they would never self-identify as a person with a disability). You may have elderly relatives, friends who hope to buy a house, colleagues who depend on public transport. The metaphor of competition discourages you from understanding that – whether or not you know anyone who benefits from a particular branch of public spending – we all benefit from being the kind of country that chooses to help those in need.
The wild bit is we all know this, instinctively. Even decades of neo-liberal brainwashing can’t completely erase our essential instinct to care about other people. We know it’s bloody weird to talk about “rail and road users” as winners because that’s… people who move around sometimes.
Alternatives to try in your organisation’s budget-response media release
I get that we’re not currently in a world where we can publish editorials about what a privilege it is to pay tax. And no editor anywhere is going to cover the detail of what’s not getting cut, what quiet government programs are going to go on being useful to people in anonymity (except maybe if you’ve done a cracking job lining up case studies… if not maybe hit me up next year).
But if you’re in the business of doing good, consider these alternatives to the individualist propaganda that pits taxpayer against community.
- Journey: Do measures in this budget take us toward an equitable, just and inclusive society? Or does it erect hurdles on the path? Who is falling behind, or carrying extra weight?
- Nature: Society as an ecosystem. What are we nurturing and feeding? What is growing wild and untamed, and where is there drought? Alt: society as a circuit or machine with interrelated parts
- Healthcare and nurturing: How healthy is the country, and what do we need to care for or attend to?
Bonus points: see if you can write the whole thing without referring to “investment” in your sector or “delivering” outcomes.
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