Ask yourself this: what has a government budget surplus ever done for you?
Has it given you good quality, prompt, free dental care?
If you're a parent, has it provided free, around-the-clock child-care?
Has it given you high quality public education, including free access to tertiary education?
If you're an indigenous Australian, has it paid the compensation due for the genocidal policies directed against your people for more than 200 years? Or been used to address the racial discrimination you experience?
Has it meant that you've enjoyed safe, reliable, cheap public transport services wherever you've lived?
If you've been unemployed, was some of it used to guarantee that your standard of living didn't drop when you lost your job? Or to create a new job for you as an alternative to relying on welfare payments?
And has it contributed significantly to solving environmental problems, such as developing renewable energy sources to reverse the growth in greenhouse gases, or tackling salination and other forms of soil degradation?
Your answer to these, and hundreds of similar questions, is almost certainly no.
So, when the establishment media headlines scream "Budget bonanza" and "30-year high" — because the 1999-2000 federal budget surplus turned out to be $12.7 billion, not the $7.8 billion predicted in May — the main question is, who benefits?
The federal Coalition government has built up that huge surplus by attacking the rights and living standards of indigenous people, refugees and migrants, workers and social security recipients, through funding cuts to health care, public education, environmental clean-ups and child-care, privatisation, and through shifting of the tax burden onto workers and the poor, even while subsidies to big business have increased and company tax rates have been cut.
Many government departments and programs did not even spend all of their allocated budgets, including regional telecommunications, rail upgrades and the refugee detention programs (which may help explain the poor conditions in the detention camps). Another contributor to the higher-than-expected surplus was higher company tax collections, which came from higher, in many cases record profits, produced by working people.
Announcing the surplus, treasurer Peter Costello promised not to decrease petrol taxes or increase education spending, but to pay off government debt. The chief result of that will be to reduce interest rate pressures on business, boosting their profits.
The surplus also provides the Howard government with an opportunity to offer tax cuts before the next election: a carrot soon to be dangled before us to encourage forgetfulness about all of the assaults launched by the Coalition during the last four years.
However, beware of the stick that always accompanies such carrots: if the government follows its past course, the tax cuts will be mainly for better-off individuals and big companies, while growing indirect taxes, such as the GST and petrol excise, will raise prices and rob all people of more of their disposable income.