What do Australians think of the Federal Budget?
Posted on May 13, 2009 by by scoop
So the Federal Government Budget was delivered yesterday and we are now listening to experts talking about it but what is the community saying?
The Federal Government Budget website points out the key initiatives of the 2009-10 budget:
- $3.4 billion for roads
- $4.6 billion for metro rail
- $389 million for ports and freight infrastructure
- $4.5 billion for the Clean Energy Initiative, which includes $1.0 billion of existing funding
- $2.6 billion in projects focused on universities and research from the Education Investment Fund
- $3.2 billion in projects focused on hospitals and health infrastructure from the Health and Hospitals Fund
- Partnering with the private sector to build the $43 billion National Broadband Network
- A pension increase of $32.49 per week for singles and $10.14 per week combined for couples on the full rate
- A crucial boost of $2.7 billion in funding for tertiary education, research and innovation
- $1.5 billion for the Jobs and Training Compact, providing education and services to support young people, retrenched workers and local communities
- A 50 per cent Small Business Tax Break for eligible assets
- Extending the First Home Owners Boost for an extra 6 months
You can also visit the ABC-budget, SMH-2009 budget or news – 2009 budget for more details about it.
ABC Canberra also reports how the federal budget has left a $50 million hole in the ACT’s finances. The predicted cut in the ACT’s federal revenue is now about $200 million over four years.
So what do you think of the budget and will it help you?
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18 Comments to “What do Australians think of the Federal Budget?”
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If the budget is good for the community it will be good for me. Unfortunately no one knows what the outcome will be. I find it astounding that we can do an excellent job of predicting the weather next week and yet we cannot predict the economy. We should be able to predict the economy because it is something we constructed, we can change it and we can measure precisely in real time the key factors. We can’t predict the economy because the way we have constructed it means it must behave in a random fashion.
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The economy is far from random, and for the most part it is predicted just about as accurately as the weather. The thing with predicting what the economy will do is that there are a lot of different factors involved (many more than are involved in predicting the weather, anyway). It’s not the way it’s constructed so much as the number (and unpredictability) of events that impact on it.
There are many ways of simplifying the economic model to create short-term, highly variable scenarios, and to make a a pretty good guess. I do this myself (using only university-level economics studies to help me!). Sometimes I get it wrong, but mostly it’s because there’s some factor I didn’t consider, or there was a factor that I thought would go one way that ended up going the other.
Economics isn’t difficult, and it isn’t that we can’t or won’t measure the key factors and extrapolate neatly from that. The only uncertainty in economics is determing all the key factors, and then predicting how they will change …
L
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Extending the home owners grant will help me and keep me in bussiness….but as for the deficit and all the handouts given to get us that nice deficit….im not happy with. I would have been alot happier not getting that $900 cheque and simply have gotten a small tax cut, one that would give me a little something extra in my pay..
Or maybe ALL that money given out spent on infrastructure. The retail sector is not the only industry that needed the money..
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The stimulus package was quite well thought out. The idea is to spread it around as much as possible. Actually, infrastructure projects got a bigger chunk of the money than did the handouts. The thing with the handouts is it doesn’t all pour directly back into the retail sector, as you may think. A lot of it goes in to the building industry, into small business (that may be struggling), into banking and investment, and into pretty much all direct-to-consumer sales. From there, they flow upwards, to delivery companies, manufacturers, and wholesale goods suppliers. Then they go up again …
The whole point was to stimulate the economy. By passing the money around to as many different people in as many different industries and situations as possible, then it’s going to be spent across all facets of the economy.
Yes, the deficit is big, and it’s scary. But we’re in a recession. The only way we’re going to get out of it is by not allowing it to spiral downwards. Consider your own budget … when you get some extra money, you might do something like pay off your credit card debt, or put it in a savings account ‘for a rainy day’. The economy is no different, while times are good, we build up a surplus. Then, say you lose your job, you will use your credit card, or that saved money, to get you through until you have income coming in again. In the case of the government, they’re now using that extra money (plus the extra credit we have, ie: the deficit) to get the country through until we are financially stable again. At that point, if they’re doing things right, we’ll pay back the deficit, and start working on a surplus again (or, we’ll pay off the credit card debt, and then start saving).
There’s no mystic magic to economics. It’s just being able to understand the different pressures.
L
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L,
the problem is that everyone blames the govt for the deficit. they haven’t been hit by a recession, the stimulus package kept us insulated to some degree, and the only companies that have slashed jobs have been foreign owned.
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Yes, but quite a few Australians work for foreign companies, too. We’re all potentially in the firing line.
I see your point, though, and it’s very valid. Especially for those who don’t work in an international context, the recession still seems very far away, and it’s harder to swallow a deficit that large when you’re not feeling some pain to justify it.
The thing is, the reason we’re not feeling the pain, is because of the deficit, not despite it
L
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Every person I know who has lost their job in the last three months has been owned by an Australian firm. The economy is tightening, just less in Canberra than other places.
The homebuyers grant is bad policy, and should not have been extended. Most other budget measures aren’t so bad though.
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They’ve really done quite an admirable job in delivering a budget that doesn’t sting too much (other than the gaping deficit, of course. But think how much worse it could have been if we hadn’t gone into this recession with a surplus!). We’re lucky.
L
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But who should we thank? it wasn’t john howard, it was peter costello.
Dermott, that is true there are several companies who have closed or sacked staff, but on a scale vs the big globals, there has been far less impact that has been wreaked on the global stage – CSC alone lost 1,000 staff.
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L is right, it could have been worse but I can’t really complain about it.
I don’t think anyone expected a global recession but unfortunate it is here and we just have to wait and see what happens in the next few years.
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7:30 Report – Michael Brissenden had some interesting things to say about an early election – apparently the Libs can’t afford it and might have to borrow money to run a campaign. But it seems to be a habit in the first term for new governments to call an early election. I wonder if fixed term elections would be better?
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Peterh, actually, I wouldn’t go so far as to thank them just yet. Their budgets were nothing to write home about, and the surplus probably should have been a lot bigger than it was. Still, at least we had something put away for that proverbial rainy day. Because his noodly appendage knows it’s raining cats and dogs now.
Valeri, nobody has much to complain about with the budget, simply because they’ve tried to please everyone. That in a lot of ways is smart, because the public was looking for something to complain about in the budget and very people people can gripe about it. Including the opposition, although I have no doubt they’ll give it a good shot (most of the arguments are hinging around the deficit, but nobody is really willing to suggest areas that should get cut).
L
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Michael de Percy said “it seems to be a habit in the first term for new governments to call an early election”.
So, in light of the fact that the last new federal government to call an early election was Bob Hawke’s in 1984 (oh, only 25 years ago), and state governments are now almost all locked into the fixed-term cycle, I’d ask what this claim is based on?
The last time I was in the room when a member of Rudd’s government was asked about an early election, they said it was “politically very unadvisable” to call one, and the public don’t like them.
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I don’t completely understand the reasons behind why they might call an early election (and what the good and bad effects that might have on the government, the opposition, and the people).
I definitely haven’t seen anything solid about whether or not they’re going to, though. Hearsay and speculation, yes, but facts? No.
L
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Hi Dermott – Howard called an election in 1998 six months before the formal end of term. This means the last three new governments (that is, formed from different parties) have called early elections. This is what my suggestion, not claim, was based on.
As for the states and territories, Queensland, Western Australia, Tasmania and the Northern Territory do not have fixed terms in the same sense as the others do, although I understand Tasmania has set the date for 2010 in the interests of moving toward fixed terms (this may change as it coincides with SA in 2010).
I have no preference for either fixed terms or otherwise. In many ways Australian politics is more dynamic due to the flexibility of federal terms.
To clarify, I was wondering what others thought about the ability of governments’ to speculate on early elections (Carpenter and Bligh most recently in the states) and how this affects the nation, especially during times of crisis where political uncertainty can affect market confidence.
Cheers,
Michael.
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Sorry, I meant last two new governments have called early elections in their first term!
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I am the last person in the world to defend Howard on anything. But to call the 1998 election ‘early’ is ridiculous. Two and a half years after the previous one isn’t an early election.
When Keating came to power, not only did he NOT call an early election, he made fun of those on the Liberal side who wanted him to (are you old enough to remember the “because I want to do you slowly” line?)
Rudd is extremely unlikely to call an early election, unless he can portray the Opposition as making the country ungovernable (as Whitlam did in 1974 when he called one). We’re a long way from that.
Actually, the day after I heard a Labor Senator say that “a double dissolution would be received very poorly by the electorate”, the media started with their “Will the govt call an early election?” mantra. Which proves to me that whenever the media are talking early elections or double dissolutions, they’ve got nothing useful to say, so they’re making up idle speculation to hear themselves speak.
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Dermott, you flatter me. I remember Keating saying that, the same year my first child was born and I graduated from Duntroon. Who could forget? If you missed ‘Keating the Musical’ the song ‘I wanna do you slowly’ starts half-way through this youtube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhTMbkGT_O0
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