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Bruton and Burton seek to channel public reaction to budget
29 November 2009
Between now and December 9, Brian Lenihan, his ministerial colleagues and his officials will be fine-tuning the toughest Irish budget in living memory.
It will be a period of long nights and tough choices, fraught with the possibility that one wrong call on budget day could be the straw that brings down the government. Remember the Vat on children’s shoes and Garret FitzGerald’s desperate pleas to the late Jim Kemmy to save his administration?
It will also be a busy time for the main opposition spokespersons on finance, Richard Bruton, Joan Burton and their respective backrooms.
The unique circumstances of this budget require a unique response from Bruton and Burton. In recent years, opposition politicians have tended to keep a low profile in the run-up to the budget.
When the government’s coffers were bulging, all the cards were held by the minister. They were days of easy choices, and it was the government which decided who would feed from the overflowing trough. The other side of the House was pretty irrelevant to the entire proceedings.
Nowadays the choices are all about where the axe or the tax falls. There is more information in the public domain on the background to this budget than ever before. The target of closing the gap between the government’s outgoings and income has been well established.
The publication of the McCarthy and Tax Commission reports in the summer provided a public menu of all the possibilities.
They also put the opposition into a position of being confronted with real choices which had been developed by quasi-independent non-political groups.
The scheduling of recent Dail statements on the budget was an attempt by the government to smoke out the opposition. It did not succeed. While Richard Bruton did unveil a novel and costed idea about cutting employers’ PRSI, Joan Burton refused to be drawn. She compared the government’s motives to asking Giovanni Trapattoni to show his tactical notes to his French counterpart 24 hours before the game started in Paris.
However, under pressure from the government and from a media weary of kicking Fianna Fail, both parties have promised to publish their own proposals before the budget. The challenge is different for both. For the past 18 months, Labour has excelled in broad-brush opposition, feeling the public’s pain and empathising with every hard-done-by sector, especially those paid by the taxpayer.
It is certainly likely that Labour’s plan will draw heavily from Ictu’s wishlist of vague principles.
Labour subscribes to the ‘‘pot of gold’’ theory, which holds that increasing tax on the wealthy, ie, those households with a single income of more than €100,000,will get us out of this economic hump.
In last week’s Sunday Business Post poll, this was the policy option which attracted most public support. The same poll also showed a fall of 2 per cent in Labour’s support. Labour has avoided making the really tough calls to date and there should be no expectation that it will change tack in its pre-budget publication. The same poll showed Fine Gael at an all-time high, despite the fact that it has endorsed the government’s spending cut target and has generally taken a pro-spending cuts stance. Because it has nailed its colours to the spending cuts mast, there is no doubt but that Bruton and his colleagues have gone through the McCarthy report line by line to see what they could endorse on the way to €4 billion in cuts, especially the ‘‘low-hanging fruit’’ which carries less pain for voters.
Bruton is a master of detail. He loves nothing more than immersing himself in the minutiae of spending programmes. His failing at times can be that his solutions, while technically feasible, are difficult for the man or woman in the street to understand.
In his pre-budget plan, Bruton must avoid the pitfall of trying to look like a Minister for Finance in exile, with every t crossed and i dotted.
While he has to outline some big ticket cuts, Fianna Fail would like nothing more than a hit list of Fine Gael cuts which it would use to preface every defence of the budget - ‘‘at least we didn’t do such-and-such like Fine Gael’’.
The more detail Bruton gives, the more scope there is for Fianna Fail to muddy the post-budget debate.
Finding significant points of difference with the government is essential for Fine Gael. The long-signalled government intention to cut child benefit has given Fine Gael a high-profile cut that it will oppose rigorously.
The government has made a strategic decision to delay the budget by a week in a clear attempt to curtail the time available for negative reaction to build up before the Christmas holidays.
Both Fine Gael and Labour know that they will have a very short window of opportunity to shape public reaction to the budget.
Their best opportunity is on budget day itself. That’s why between now and December 9, Bruton, Burton and their advisers will spend some time shaping for the killer soundbites that will populate their reaction speeches and might catch the mood of the nation.
Fine Gael has the added advantage that the manthe public used to look to for analysis, George Lee, is now on its benches.
A strong but simple characterisation of the budget, delivered on Budget Day with the combined force of Bruton and Lee, could be a powerful one-two.
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