Federal budget 2024: expert analysis

Australian Community Media

Labor’s self-proclaimed ‘responsible’ budget has delivered the second consecutive surplus in nearly two decades. Canberra Times politics reporter Miriam Webber and political analyst Mark Kenny break down what it means for Australians.

Transcript

00:00 I'm Miriam Weber, I'm a public service and politics reporter at the Canberra Times.

00:04 I'm here with Mark Kenny, our political analyst, and we are in the budget lock-up.

00:07 Mark, what should we know about this budget?

00:10 Well, it's a really interesting budget, I think, Miriam.

00:13 It's perhaps crafted with an eye to an election.

00:16 Now, everyone thinks the election's going to be next year, May next year, so a year

00:21 from now.

00:22 This budget suggests, and the forecast, you know, both the spending and the forecast,

00:26 but it suggests the government's thinking of not doing another budget before the next

00:31 election.

00:32 Now, that could mean an election this year, if the PM thinks that that's the best time

00:35 to go, or perhaps more likely early in 2025.

00:40 So quite interesting from that point of view.

00:42 And there's a fair bit of spending in this budget, given how narrow the sort of path

00:47 was, you know, fighting inflation, but also protecting voters from the sort of harsh economic

00:52 conditions.

00:53 So I think that's the judgment people will have to make about the budget.

00:56 Does it do that successfully without adding to inflation?

00:58 And you mentioned those harsh economic conditions.

01:01 We've seen a little bit of energy bill relief expanded to more Australians, some tweaks

01:05 to income support payments.

01:07 What do you make of those?

01:08 What kind of impact do you think they'll have on the ground?

01:10 Yeah, and we see also assistance in medicine as well, rental relief, these sorts of things.

01:15 So I think the idea here is that, and I did ask Dr Chalmers about this in the press conference,

01:23 about whether he could have done more to fight inflation.

01:25 And I think what he's saying is, look, people are really hurting out there.

01:29 Vulnerable households are really feeling the pain of high interest rates, high energy rates,

01:34 high food costs, insurance, everything's sort of going up.

01:37 So I think all of these assistances that they've dialled in are about trying to reduce prices

01:44 without adding to inflation.

01:46 They think they've got the balance about right, where it doesn't create an inflation problem.

01:51 The interesting thing is the government has this, the Treasury has this forecast of inflation

01:55 coming back down into the RBA's target band of 2-3% at the end of this year.

02:01 Now if that happens, that's a very happy story for the government, but it's a bit of a punt

02:05 too.

02:06 We also did see some big increases to the APS, actually a lot bolder than we had expected

02:11 after the 10,000 increase last year.

02:14 There's a 12,000 increase this year as well.

02:15 Yeah, what did you make of that?

02:16 So I think it really shows that the government's trying to pitch it as an investment in the

02:20 jobs that really affect Australians.

02:22 So things like Services Australia, people who are processing Centrelink payments.

02:27 Home Affairs is also getting $100 million, which is going towards a baseline boost to

02:32 its funding.

02:33 The government again gets to sort of have a bit of a win here because they can say we're

02:38 cleaning up the mess of the last government.

02:41 And so that's sort of the framing around the growth in the public service in this budget.

02:45 Yeah, the last government had that whole catastrophe really around consultants, PWC and others

02:50 who got themselves in all kinds of trouble.

02:53 We found out that so much of what we thought was government activity was being farmed out

02:58 to private companies and not always giving value for money.

03:01 I think it's an understatement to make that point.

03:03 So the government is very actively going about taking jobs that were in the consultant side

03:08 and putting them back in permanent public service.

03:11 And again, a little bit of a gamble if we are heading towards an earlier election, as

03:15 you say, because the Coalition will probably look at those jobs and consider whether they're

03:19 wasteful as it has done with the last increase.

03:22 So the government will need to really trust that Australians can back them up on this.

03:26 Yeah, very interesting budget.

03:27 [BLANK_AUDIO]

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