Scott Morrison has today proudly declared the Australian budget deficit is finally under control, following a tricky bit of book-keeping that will see Australian Parliament House rezoned as a twelve bathroom duplex and negatively geared in order to balance the nation’s budget.

Making the announcement outside the former Parliament House this morning, the Treasurer sought to play down allegations that his party had become too dependant on negative gearing, pointing out that they’d be stupid not to exploit the tax loophole while it still existed. “I know negative gearing isn’t exactly popular,” said Mr Morrison, “But until whichever idiot is in charge of changing laws in this country gets off their ass and does something about the loophole, we’d be stupid not to keep exploiting it.”

“Besides, we’ve been renting the place out to lobbyists for years, we may as well get the tax advantages.”

The move has been hailed as “genius” and “incredibly long sighted” by many economists on the Murdoch payroll, who have pointed out that there are also many flow-on tax benefits that can be taken advantage of by rezoning the country’s parliament as a inner-city sharehouse. “The best part is we can write off repairs made by tenants,” confirmed Minister for Finance Mathias Cormann. “Which means we can finally fix all the holes that keeps appearing between loo cubicles down the hall from Bernardi’s office.”

The move comes as just one part of a raft of changes to be announced in this year’s budget which seek to take advantage of the modern economy. “We’ve implemented a range of innovative cost cutting measures in this budget,” announced Morrison. “This includes replacing all ministerial helicopter entitlements with Uber credits, privatising all opposition offices in the building to ensure we get market rent value for them, and letting out One Nation’s offices on Airbnb seeing as their senators only seem to occupy them for a week at most.”

When asked as to why the party hadn’t moved forward with this plan earlier, Corman said it had been a tricky proposition to get past cabinet, with ministers split over whether it was appropriate to mortgage the nation’s parliament on a private home loan package, or whether they would be better off taking out the loan on a series of credit cards in order to harvest the frequent flyer points.

Labor meanwhile stood firmly against the move, before retracting their position, softening it, putting their policy to a focus group and then finally deciding to just ask someone in western Sydney what they wanted. Bill Shorten is expected to make a formal apology for their new “ban all Muslims and also build an illegal extension out the back of Parliament House” policy later this afternoon.