Australian budget

When former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull first announced Snowy Hydro 2.0 pumped hydro project in 2017, it was billed as a $2 billion project capable of producing 2 megawatts of power on demand and 350,000 megawatt-hours of storage by 2021.

In the debate over the appropriate size of the migration intake, proponents often reference estimates from the federal Treasury or the Parliamentary Budget Office to justify a larger intake.

It’s time. Louise Crawford – convener of the highly influential Labor Environment Action Network (LEAN) – moved an amendment to ensure the Albanese government’s tax policies remove disincentives for orderly decarbonisation.

The Parliamentary Budget Office recently forecast that the gross debt of the states and territories will exceed $650 billion in 2026-27, up from just $266 billion in 2018-19.

Some guy named Angus Taylor has made a very poor case that One Nation will ruin the budget.

On Tuesday, both the NSW and Queensland state governments delivered their budgets.

There is growing concern that Australia’s tax and transfer system disproportionately benefits older, wealthier retirees while placing a rising burden on younger workers.

The AFR’s John Kehoe argues that “the government has inadvertently underwritten a tobacco crime wave and is now trying to plug the revenue hole by increasing taxes on capital income”.

The federal government has introduced a suite of structural, legislative and administrative reforms to slow the rapid growth in National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) costs.

The budget papers show that the Treasury’s base case is that the inflation rate will ease to 2.5% in 2027, after peaking at a forecast 5% in mid-2026.

Tuesday’s federal budget was another missed opportunity to fix the most egregious aspect of the nation’s tax system: the heavy reliance on taxing workers via personal income taxes.

Below is a dot-point summary of Treasurer Jim Chalmers’ budget speech, which outlines the main budget measures.

Australia relies more heavily on personal income tax than almost any other OECD country.

Tonight’s federal budget will go to great pains to show that the deficit isn’t as bad as claimed and that the government is working hard to balance the books.

Details of the federal government’s changes to capital gains tax (CGT) and negative gearing have been leaked to Phil Coorey at The AFR.

I used to be a supporter of the Inland Rail Project, which aimed to build an inland rail freight line between Melbourne and Brisbane.

Tuesday’s Victorian budget reported cash deficits, which capture general government spending and capital expenditure, as far as the eye can see. As illustrated below by Justin Fabo from Antipodean Macro, “Victoria’s general government cash budget deficit is forecast to be ~1% of gross state product (GSP) in each of the next 4 years”.

Former NSW Senior Trade and Investment Commissioner Mike Newman recently appeared on John Anderson’s podcast and effectively argued that Australia’s bureaucracy is too large compared with other advanced nations.

The AFR has produced the following chart showing the massive backlog of parent visas awaiting permanent residency: In the 2024-25 financial year, there were 157,000 parent visas in the backlog, up 52,000 from 2018-19.

Left-leaning outfits like The Australia Institute have for years argued that Australia is a low-taxing country (for example, here and here). Robert Carling from the Centre for Independent Studies (CIS) has challenged this view, arguing that the low-taxing claim is misleading and based on flawed comparisons.

I reported this week that the cost of the Snowy Hydro 2.0 project is estimated to have ballooned from an initial announced cost of $2 billion in 2017 to around $42 billion.

The federal government will introduce new eligibility criteria for the National Disability Insurance Scheme as part of changes announced by Health Minister Mark Butler on Wednesday.

Australia’s federal budget uses two main deficit measures, and they differ because they treat certain transactions differently—especially asset sales, loans, and off‑budget funds.