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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