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February 23, 2026
Monday 23 February 2026
Simon Benson
The Australian
For ordinary Australians, the name Katy Gallagher is probably better known inside the ACT, where she served as chief minister before joining federal Labor a decade ago. But as of last week the federal Finance Minister now may be better known overseas after a social media post of her performance before a Senate estimates hearing into the state of the nation’s finances went viral – and not in a flattering way.
Gallagher was left stumped by an unsurprising question about the alleged $114bn of budget savings she and Jim Chalmers boast about as evidence of their powers of thriftiness.
Asked by Victorian Liberal senator James Paterson whether this number was net or gross – an important distinction – Gallagher couldn’t answer until a departmental official whispered to her, “it’s gross”. The question goes to the central debate over the level of the Albanese government’s fiscal management and whether it can be believed.
How can $114bn in alleged savings be claimed as real savings if it has all been spent elsewhere?
Paterson’s office clipped up a 90-second grab of Gallagher’s blooper, put it on Instagram with the simple caption “This is Australia’s Finance Minister”, and let social media do the rest.
By last Friday it had posted more than three million views across numerous platforms around the world. It was a particular hit in the US and Britain.
The only thing that has come close to it before was a blooper of Foreign Minister Penny Wong stumbling through an answer on what the definition of assistance was for ISIS brides. That hit one million views.
Anyone who has seen the Gallagher tapes may be left with a pretty poor impression of how Australia’s federal budget is being managed. This is not just a problem now for the Treasurer but also for Anthony Albanese. What was it that American journalist and political satirist HL Mencken said of truth and ridicule?
The role of finance minister is one often overlooked and undervalued and one that others ministers may wish could be banished from the Cabinet room altogether. But only if the person holding that office is doing their job properly.
A finance minister’s primary role is to say no, but for the rare occasion a minister may brighten their day through an abnormal offering to spend less of our money, or at least spend it better.
Peter Walsh, as Labor’s finance minister from 1984 to 1990, not only knew this instinctively but practised it relentlessly. He was the Hawke government’s Dr No.
In the eyes of some – and had it not been for the Liberal Party’s finance minister Mathias Cormann, who is now head of the OECD – Walsh may still be regarded as the best finance minister the country ever had. He was the fiscal conscience that haunted Bob Hawke and Paul Keating and menaced his Labor colleagues.
Walsh shuffled off this mortal coil only a decade ago but it’s hard to imagine him having a place at the Labor cabinet table today. He hated the demands of special interests or vested interests, had no patience for grievance politics but, above all else, detested wasting money, particularly government money. This was largely because he understood the duty government owed to those whose money it was: the taxpayer.
Grounded in the upbringing of a farming family from the West Australian wheatbelt, Walsh saw what Gough Whitlam did and then decided Labor must do the opposite. Keating once described him as the Sid Vicious of politics, a punk rock reference to Walsh’s zeal for tearing apart budget submissions. This newspaper even honoured his departure from cabinet in 1990 with the headline: The Man Who Made Keating Look Soft.
Don Watson, in his Keating biography Recollections of a Bleeding Heart, recounts the period between 1987 and 1990 (the post-crash boom followed by the bust) when Hawke and Keating had initially steered the economy away from recession only to enter an interest rate spiral and a current account crisis as the economy began to race out of control.
“Paul Keating and Don Russell were trying to stop the political and economic cycles getting out of kilter, the left from getting wobbly and the right – principally in the shape of the Finance Minister, Peter Walsh – from quitting in disgust,” Watson wrote.
Walsh was in fact a member of the left caucus before he was “excommunicated” in 1975 and then joined the centre-left when it was formed almost a decade later.
His strong social justice streak didn’t disqualify him from being a ruthless finance minister. This was hard to understand for some. In his own recollections, Confessions of a Failed Finance Minister, Walsh railed against bad spending and claimed that only once the expenditure review committee had abandoned its culture of “permissiveness” could the fiscal restoration begin.
Tony Abbott acknowledged Walsh as a politician who “shaped the way that both sides of politics see the budget for the next quarter of a century”.
“On his watch, the government he served delivered three surplus budgets, cut tariffs and company tax and enacted major micro-economic reform”.
Walsh succeeded by doing not what was popular but what was right. This resulted in Labor enacting a discipline to its budget process that put Walsh off-side not only with the Labor caucus but also the party’s natural base. He wasn’t afraid of making hard decisions in the interests of the nation.
Political columnist Geoff Kitney wrote after Walsh’s death that he “played a critical role in the transformation of Labor’s economic policy reputation during the Hawke and Keating era … Walsh hated wasteful spending, especially on politically fashionable causes.”
“And he hated the rent seekers who cruised (and still do today, in greater numbers than ever) the corridors of Parliament House trying to convince ministers that their cause is the one that really deserves support.”
Even Cormann recognised his contribution, saying of Walsh’s book that it “remains the compelling manual of choice for any finance minister today”.
If only that were the case.