Lazy Legislators
Craig Turner
22 June 2026
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The Australian government presented its 2026 budget on 12 May.

It seems to have been drafted roughly on a whiteboard.

Key flaws include,

    It proposes changes to the housing market that industry groups warn will
    deepen the housing crisis, and that property advisors warn will lead to
    dramatic rises in rental prices.

    It disproportionately penalises small business owners and startups. This
    makes it harder to justify starting a business in Australia.

    Several aspects of the tax changes directly and brazenly break promises
    that Albanese and his team made repeatedly to the electorate at recent
    federal elections.

    The NDIS savings targets named are widely viewed as unrealistic. In this
    way, the budget is avoiding necessary reform of that system, kicking the
    can down the road, and doing so in a way that is dishonest.

    Even accounting for the untrustworthy NDIS savings targets, the budget
    fails to substantially improve the budget bottom-line.

    The budget gives a large number of discretionary powers to the Treasurer,
    rather than codifying behaviour in legislation, as is customary.

It is more than two years until the next federal election must be called.
Perhaps Treasurer Jim Chalmers expected the budget legislation to be waved
through the senate with support from the Australian Greens party, and then to
ride out the weather from broken promises in that time.

But this budget has been so poorly received that the government has had to
retreat on key aspects of it, and may yet be pushed to make further retreats.

The Greens have so far not given their support to it. Greens Senator Nick
McKim has objected to the number of discretionary powers that Chalmers has
sought to give himself.

The high number of discretionary powers could be seen as a power grab by that
minister. But I suspect it is a product of something else: laziness.

When you are drafting a piece of legislation, it is much easier to delegate
powers to a minister than to do the up-front consideration that decides how to
deal with a matter.

The poor workmanship of this budget is part of a larger pattern. Over
multiple rounds, the ALP executive has shown itself to be unwilling or
incapable of rising to the detail required of its responsibilities,

    1. The social media ban needed complex identification infrastructure that
    did not exist.

    2. A 2024 environmental protection bill would have established a regulator
    without defining what it would enforce.

    3. The AML/CTF legislation includes heavy delegated powers.

    4. Attorney-General Michelle Rowland introduced legislation seeking to
    block FOI applications. This seems to have been a lazy attempt to fix a
    narrow problem of there being too many low-effort AI-generated
    applications. Her bill featured unwarranted ministerial powers.

    5. Albanese and his Attorney-General botched the design of the Royal
    Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion. They initially rejected
    a Royal Commission, instead announcing a narrow national security review
    under former intelligence chief Dennis Richardson. Political pressure
    forced a U-turn weeks later. At this point they crudely bolted together
    Richardson's highly-classified intelligence inquiry and a social cohesion
    mandate. Richardson resigned shortly afterwards, seeing no suitable role
    for himself in the rushed framework.

    6. The wording for the Voice Referendum was generated by a quick meeting,
    and did not reaching the drafting standard of the constitution. The
    referendum pitch was - first we'll make some constitutional changes, later
    we'll sort out the detail. Voters were skeptical.

    7. Back further, the design of the National Disability Insurance Scheme
    did not consider or cover edge-cases. It has been widely rorted and is
    undermining Australia's ability to balance its budget.

    8. Now we have a budget that seems to have been crafted on a whiteboard.

Parliamentarians are (a) trustees of the constitution and (b) professional
legislators.

The ALP is not rising to those responsibilities, and is cultivating a poor
standard of workmanship.

Delegation-heavy clauses are a canary of bad legislation: it shows that the
detail work has not been done.

A vulgar idiom warns about the futility of polishing a turd.

The Senate should not merely reject the broad delegated powers, but should
treat the presence of them as evidence that the budget is half-baked and
therefore unfit-for-purpose, and reject it entirely.