Last night, Sky News host Paul Murray announced that he had ‘come across’ the scripts for the Government’s post-budget announcement TV scripts. Presumably he stole them from a vault during a daring heist where he had to dodge lasers and romance a gorgeous dame.
According to Murray, the budget is intended to save Australia $16 billion over the next four years, and include crackdowns on superannuation tax exemptions and tax avoidance by multinational corporations. Very curiously, this info emerged only hours after the Coalition was given its double dissolution trigger.
Murray said that the info he had was ‘not a leak’, but rather a scoop which reveals how the government plans to have its info disseminated before the election. Quite possible – this sort of thing has been teased before budgets plenty of times – but doing it in the form of completed TV scripts seems kinda odd, right?
Because it’s a TV script, it says very little about numbers. Just that $16 billion is the number they’re looking to save over four years.
Either way, the Government ain’t commenting. “The Government doesn’t respond to speculative reports,” said a spokesperson to Treasurer Scott Morrison.
Labor seem pretty convinced that this wasn’t intentional, though. Financial Spokesperson Jim Chalmers thinks that the Government isn’t on a unity ticket, and that this represents an administration “so divided and so dysfunctional that they are leaking against each other on the first day of the campaign.”
Either way, this is going to be an excruciating 72 days before the election. But looks like the Government’s narrative isn’t tax cuts – it’s all about saving Australia’s money.
Source: Sky News.
Photo: Getty Images / Stefan Postles.
