What's in the Federal budget for Bass this year? (16/5/2024)

The Examiner discusses what Bass will get out of the Federal budget. Video by Aaron Smith and Paul Scambler (16/5/2024)

Transcript

00:00 G'day, my name's Craig Thompson. I'm the editor of the Launceston Examiner. I'm here today with Joe

00:03 Colebrook and Aaron Smith and we're talking about what's in the budget for Bass. So there's 47,000

00:09 taxpayers in Bass and every single taxpayer will receive a tax cut. Explain that to us, Joe.

00:13 Well, obviously this budget has drawn some criticism locally because it doesn't have much

00:18 by way of targeted investment in Tasmania. However, the government's major headline piece

00:23 of policy, the Stage 3 tax cuts, will still benefit people around here. I mean, you're

00:28 looking at on average getting about $1,343 back at tax time and this is taking the original Stage

00:35 3 tax cuts as they were proposed by the Morrison government and spreading the benefit across those

00:40 towards the middle income band of the spectrum. It's essentially taking tax cuts for high earners

00:46 and making them for the many and not the few. Great, okay. The Albany, New Zealand government

00:51 is investing $4 billion to deliver cheaper medicines. There's more than $1.6 million already

00:59 saved by residents in Bass due to that cheaper medicines policy and pensioners and concession

01:04 card holders in Bass won't pay more than $7.70 for their PBS medications for the next five years

01:11 under their budget policy. Also, the budget will help people with a help debt or a HEX debt.

01:22 There's more than 10,000 people with a help debt in Bass. How will the budget help them, Aaron?

01:26 Yeah, it's really the big news for students really in Australia, but also in Bass here.

01:30 It's the government's promise to make the HEX help system fairer. This is, of course,

01:34 the contribution and loan scheme. It's been around since 1989. Labor has said that it will cut $3

01:40 billion in the student debt for more than 3 million people nationwide. As you said, that does

01:45 account for 10,000 people just in Bass here. They're doing this by capping the HEX indexation

01:51 rate, which is either the consumer price index or the wage price index, whichever is the lower of

01:55 the two of them, and then backdating that to the 1st of June, 2023. The government claims this means

02:01 debts will never grow faster than wages, but not everyone's happy with it at this stage. Federal

02:07 Deputy Greens Leader, Maureen Faruqi, said the policy promised big and delivered scraps. And I

02:12 quote here, "Labor's little tweaks to make the cooked student debt crisis slightly less cooked

02:17 won't cut it for millions." So quite a brutal stabbing there from the Greens, but as we would

02:22 expect from them at this stage. Yeah, well, it is easy to snipe from the sidelines, Aaron, and it's

02:26 a lot harder to create policy. They're also increasing the maximum rate of Commonwealth

02:32 rent assistance. Yes, so Commonwealth rent assistance, this is paid to people who are

02:38 receiving income support payments and obviously helps out with the rent. The government are

02:43 increasing that rate by 10%, so it's going to help about 5,295 households in Bass. However,

02:50 on the flip side, there hasn't really been much of an increase or benefit to those receiving income

02:55 support payments like JobSeeker, which remain below the Henderson poverty line, which is

03:00 nationally recognised as the poverty line. So the 6,000 people in North East Tasmania are probably

03:06 going to miss out on that front. Okay. And there's a few other things in the health side of things.

03:13 The Albanian government has invested $2.8 billion into strengthening Medicare by providing additional

03:19 Medicare urgent care clinics, and there's already one in Launceston. And they're also promising

03:25 reforms to the NDIS. So overall, it's a fairly good budget, probably a 7 out of 10, obviously

03:32 targeted at reducing inflation and cost of living support. And I reckon there might be a possible

03:38 early election. So go to theexaminer.com.au for more news and analysis, and subscribe for further

03:44 daily news updates.

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