Australians aren’t interested in winners and losers any more. That’s what the treasurer, Scott Morrison, said during Tuesday’s pre-budget speech. “Australian people have moved on from that,” he claimed. But just in case Mr Morrison is wrong about that ...  Big and small: they’re all winners this year, thanks to a suite of tax measures.  Related: Smokers to pay more than $45 for a packet of cigarettes from 2020  This is a big budget for roads, with a plethora of upgrades and new roads planned across the country, at a cost of an extra $2.5bn (taking the amount to be spent on roads in the next year to $7.9bn in total).  3. People earning more than $80,000 (who are mainly men)  They’ll be getting what amounts to a tax cut.  The treasurer is promising us an “ideas boom”. Here’s ScoMo on how that is going to work: “Harnessing the power of innovation and entrepreneurship, to create our own ideas boom, lies at the heart of our plan to support jobs and growth in a stronger new economy.”  5. The Australian Tax Office  They’ll be employing 539 extra staff in order to create a 1,000-strong taskforce aimed at policing and prosecuting companies, multinationals and wealthy individuals who dodge paying their tax.  Tasmania’s whisky producers will have more reason than normal to be cheerful with an excise rebate for craft distillers, aimed at expanding the industry and making the spirit more affordable for drinkers.  Commercial TV and radio licence fees are about to go down by about 25%. The government said it had found that “the rapidly changing media market was placing significant financial pressure on commercial broadcasters”.  Related: Budget 2016: ‘jobs and growth’ pitch costs wealthy retirees, smokers and multinationals  Top brass should be pretty happy with themselves, having won $32.3bn in this year’s budget to pay for new subs and lots of other military hardware including four new maritime patrol aircraft, two new air tanker transports and 49 training aircraft.  This is a bad budget for carp. Carp in the Murray-Darling basin will be given a special herpes virus that is “safe for humans and Australia’s fish and wildlife” - but fatal for carp. The press release from Christopher Pyne’s department describes carp as “Australia’s worst freshwater aquatic pest”, which is much nicer than what Barnaby Joyce called them.  This is not a green budget. The Great Barrier Reef gets an extra $171m but that’s a drop in the ocean if you compare it to the money our roads will be getting (just to pick one example: see above).  The government is going to loan $65m to the Indigenous Land Corporation, which runs the big hotel resort at Uluru, to help it out of debt. And there’s some extra help for Indigenous people in higher education. But that’s about it for Australia’s least advantaged people.  Related: New welfare recipients to get less as carbon tax compensation dropped  4. Refugees in offshore detention  Four mainland detention centres are to close, and there’s some extra cash for unaccompanied child refugees, but the big, difficult stuff – ie Nauru and Manus – doesn’t feature.  5. People who go on welfare in the future  They will get up to $14.10 less a fortnight than people on welfare right now, thanks to the scrapping of the carbon compensation scheme.  But, to be honest, they were already losers.  Turnbull’s government says it’s going to maintain its current level of “base funding” for the ABC and SBS, and also throw in some extra cash: $41m over three years to the ABC for local news and $8m to SBS to continue its commitment to multicultural services. However, ongoing “efficiency dividends” announced in the 2014 Abbott budget will mean that the cuts to public broadcasting over the next year will actually be 6.5%.
The treasurer says the Australian people have ‘moved on’ from analysing the budget through the prism of ‘winners and losers’. Read on if that’s not true!