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Keywords: Budget

  • AUSTRALIA

    Budget's arts flagship is, well, a flagship

    • Esther Anatolitis
    • 09 May 2018
    9 Comments

    The flagship cultural measure in the budget is, strangely, a flagship: the Endeavour. The government announced '$48.7 million over four years to commemorate the 250th anniversary of James Cook's first voyage to Australia and the Pacific'. A permanent presence on the first site of local trauma is not a vision for a nation.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The radical state of being content

    • Fatima Measham
    • 12 April 2018
    10 Comments

    How comfortable does anyone really need to be? The amounts of money that get quoted in remuneration packages or property portfolios is incomprehensible to many Australians who manage to survive, even thrive, on so much less. Inequality seems to be driven by an incapacity to recognise what is enough and to stop.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Where have all the arts ministers gone?

    • Eliza Berlage
    • 02 March 2018
    1 Comment

    Is it any wonder that when I came to work in the press gallery I was cynical about arts policy? In those lockup hours scouring budget papers it was clear yet again the arts would not see any wins. It wasn't always this way. Prime ministers and arts ministers of yesteryear produced arts policy informed by their personal and political interest.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Turnbull's magic budget bowl is a fantasy

    • Joe Zabar
    • 07 December 2017
    5 Comments

    Many of us have grown up with Norman Lindsay's classic tale of the magic pudding; the pudding bowl that never empties no matter how often the pudding was eaten. It seems that the magic pudding bowl has been borrowed by the federal government, if the proposed new business and income tax cuts are anything to go by.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Compulsory drug testing is no silver bullet

    • Frank Brennan
    • 29 August 2017
    10 Comments

    In an age of 'budget repair' when both sides of politics are trying to contain the welfare budget, the search for savings and silver bullets is relentless. If Ministers Porter and Tudge are really seeking 'a way of assisting people to get off drugs and back into work', they should convince their cabinet colleagues of the need to increase the Newstart and Youth Allowance so that it might provide a real start for assisting people to survive with dignity while preparing for and getting back into work.

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  • EDUCATION

    Gonski in an age of budget repair

    • Frank Brennan
    • 24 May 2017
    20 Comments

    The level of consultation prior to the announced changes was appalling. But that is water under the bridge. It's time to enunciate some clear principles, and for respectful consultations to take place investigating how those principles can be best applied. This must be done within the realistic political environment in which we find ourselves. At the same time the Catholic system should ensure its schools are more available to the poor, enacting Pope Francis's desire for 'a Church which is poor and for the poor'.

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  • PODCAST

    ChatterSquare S01E08: Comey dismissal and the Australian federal budget

    • Podcast
    • 16 May 2017

    We come to grips with the dismissal of FBI director James Comey. Is this about optics, process or something else? Then we turn to a more sedate pace in Australia, where the federal budget has neither damaged or boosted the Turnbull government. We finish with a few ways to stay intact in a tumultuous world.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Unsocial budget fails health test

    • Amy Coopes
    • 15 May 2017
    3 Comments

    Next year marks four decades since promulgation of the seminal Declaration of Alma Ata, which declared health to be a fundamental human right and laid the foundations for what are now widely championed as the social determinants of health. Without action on the social determinants, health policy can be a little like that joke about the cyclopean orthopod who, when confronted with a patient suffering fatal internal bleeding, is interested only in fixing their broken leg. So it is with last week's Budget.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Putting a face to the effects of Australia's aid freeze

    • David Holdcroft
    • 12 May 2017
    4 Comments

    Alain is one of around 11,000 people living in this particular camp in the south of Zimbabwe. It seems an unlikely location to talk of the freeze on funding for Australian foreign aid announced in the budget, but it is in places like these, unseen and therefore unknown by the Australian population, that the effects are often felt. Alain is lucky: the camp where he lives has good education. Worldwide however, only 50 per cent of children in forced migrant situations will attend primary school, 22 per cent secondary and a paltry 1 per cent any institution of higher learning.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    Climate change is the elephant in the budget room

    • Francine Crimmins
    • 11 May 2017
    7 Comments

    When Scott Morrison announced the 2017-18 Budget this week there was one phrase he didn't dare to utter in his meticulously written and rehearsed speech. It's just two short words, climate change, but when used together they conjure a public debate even our minister for the environment gets tongued tied over. Morrison's omission of climate change in the federal budget has set a tone of ignorance to improving energy policy in a meaningful way.

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  • ECONOMICS

    Budget's bank slug flouts the property precipice

    • David James
    • 10 May 2017
    3 Comments

    The $6.2 billion the government will raise through a levy on bank liabilities not only shows how out of favour banks have become, it is also, in effect, a de facto tax on property lending - a counterbalance to negative gearing and capital gains tax breaks. It is a tax on property lending because nearly all the banks' loans are mortgages for housing, or business loans secured with property. Of course the banks will pass the extra cost on to their customers, so it becomes a tax on borrowers.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    'Labor-lite' budget's social welfare report card

    • Julie Edwards
    • 10 May 2017
    5 Comments

    'Labor-lite' or not, there are many investments contained in the budget which will work towards a more just society, including the securing of funding for the National Disability Insurance Scheme by raising the Medicare levy, and the needs-based approach to school funding, dubbed 'Gonski 2.0'. But among these commitments that seek to create a more equitable Australia, this budget again seeks to vilify welfare recipients, among the most vulnerable members of our community.

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