2022 Budget

2022 - 3 - 29

2022-23 Budget: Investing in a strong future, advancing our national ... (Minister for Foreign Affairs)

Senator the Hon Zed Seselja, Minister for International Development and the Pacific. 29 March 2022. As part of our plan for a stronger future, the Morrison ...

Together with our partners in the Pacific and Timor-Leste, we continue to prioritise quality, climate-resilient infrastructure that does not add to unsustainable debt burdens. “Australia has bolstered our support to the Pacific in light of the ongoing challenges faced by the COVID-19 pandemic. “This is a very important and crucial step towards our shared recovery across the region. The Government has doubled the lending “headroom” for the Australian Infrastructure Financing Facility for the Pacific from $1.5 billion to $3 billion to respond to demand from the region and to demonstrate the strength of our partnerships. Minister for International Development and the Pacific Zed Seselja said the Government will deliver a record $1.85 billion in ODA to the Pacific in 2022-23. Under our Pacific Step-Up, the Government will provide a further $324.4 million to partner with our Pacific family on the regional response to COVID-19. Of this $314 million will be a temporary and targeted ODA measure.

Post cover
Image courtesy of "ABC News"

The 2022 budget is the yin to 2014's yang — and just as likely to ... (ABC News)

This budget is full of treats and nice things that also, very possibly, will not happen, writes Annabel Crabb.

It awakens pungent hints of the Rudd government's election-winning FuelWatch scheme, fatally wounded in 2008 by a lethal leak to Laurie Oakes of four government departments advising that it was a dud and could well drive prices up not down. It happened to John Howard 20 years ago, when — with bowser prices hurtling toward the unthinkable $1 per litre mark, oh my sides — he suddenly abandoned months of consistent, accurate and cogent argument that to cut petrol excise would be a foolish, pointless and expensive gesture and gave way to his inner gas goblin. It may well survive and have to make sense of this spending salad. Don't even start me on petrol excise, a multi-billion-dollar cut which now sits hilariously juxtaposed against the government's existing $250m Future Fuels and Vehicles Strategy, whose major purpose is to make electric vehicles price-competitive with petrol vehicles. The Australia Institute recently calculated that every million dollars spent on infrastructure creates one direct job for men and 0.2 jobs for women. There are loads of examples throughout the papers of projects which are excitably described, but not funded in any way that is readily gauged. It looks like an economic theory having a nervous breakdown in the street. The intoxicatingly named REDSPICE — a spook's dream of an acronym which stands for Resilience, Effects, Defence, Space, Intelligence, Cyber and Enablers sounds – at $9.9 billion — like a hell of an investment. It doesn't touch a hair on the head of the bottom line, if I might anatomically overstretch a metaphor, which I feel is probably perfectly appropriate when writing about this hyperextended document. The $4.3 billion dry berth facility that the PM raced over to Perth to announce recently does not have any numbers attached to it. It isn't. It's being scrapped mid-year, but a kiss-off extra payment of $420 is designed to make you feel like you're getting more. This budget is full of treats and nice things that also, very possibly, will not happen.

Post cover
Image courtesy of "ABC News"

Budget 2022: Paid parental leave boost and cash payments for ... (ABC News)

Federal government spending on climate change will be cut by 35 per cent over the next four years. Look back on 2022 budget night in our live blog.

“The government says this is a cost-of-living budget, but it fails to deal with the biggest cost of living, which is housing. “It does nothing to lift the incomes of people with the least. This budget goes a long way to addressing these handbrakes on the economy. If they cared about cost of living pressures they wouldn't have spent the best part of a decade coming after peoples wages and job security," Mr Chalmers said. The additional investment in digital infrastructure such as NBN and 5G also lends to supporting further Australia’s digitisation journey. The Federal Government will extend custody notification services in Western Australia and the Northern Territory at a cost of $1.9 million. And instead of applying to any new apprentice, it will only cover those on a “priority” list. The budget papers estimated that real wages went backwards this financial year, thanks to a 4.25 per cent jump in the cost of living. The budget forecasts deficits around $80 billion this financial year and in 2022-23. "This payment is going into the pockets of six million people right before an election. There is nothing for those parents that have older kids (not primary school age children or babies). I've compared my wages from those that I earned back in the 1990s and embarrassingly I have only earned under 20k extra in that period of time! If you own a Business, take responsibility for it and the people you employ and that means good pay.

Post cover
Image courtesy of "Limelight Magazine"

Budget 2022: Arts left reeling as funding slashed (Limelight Magazine)

Industry researchers say 2022 Budget ends COVID support far too early, as an especially dire picture emerges for film and television and for regional arts.

But Ben Eltham says the fall in regional arts funding is “bizarre”: “I live in a regional community now, and that stuff’s important. While there is a small amount of money yet to come in the RISE fund, the visual arts sector had been largely ineligible for that program until late last year when eligibility criteria were changed. Dr Helen Rusack, a Senior Lecturer in Arts Management at Edith Cowan University, said Australia ranks 27th out of the 33 OECD countries in cultural expenditure. Overall film and television funding drops from $195 million to $150 million and remains at about that level in the forward estimates. Forward projections for arts and cultural development are just $2.36 to $2.4 million a year between 2023-24 and 2025-26. I struggled to find [news coverage] beyond Twitter. … There’s a delayed effect for people understanding how much has been cut from the Budget.” “Some people in the sector don’t like RISE because they feel too much has gone to commercial stuff, but I think it’s been a reasonable stimulus,” he says. “You can clearly see that they think COVID’s over, and no more support is there,” she says. “One of the 22 recommendations of the report was that the Government develop a national cultural plan to assess the medium and long-term needs of the sector,” says Benton. “Now it’s finishing, but the sector is still in trouble. Many freelance and casual artists and cultural workers meanwhile were shut out of the JobKeeper program. Audiences are not back to 2019 levels: not even close.

Post cover
Image courtesy of "The Guardian"

Budget papers show Morrison government to reduce annual climate ... (The Guardian)

On the climate crisis and the natural environment, the story of the 2022-23 budget is one of what isn't there as much as what is.

It is possible it could help address a major flaw with the current system – its failure to factor in the cumulative impact of different projects that destroy habitat and affect threatened species and ecosystems. It focuses on hydrogen and includes projects that will add to the greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere. It included $1bn for the reef spread over nine years, mostly to help clean up agricultural run-off affecting water quality, and $804m for Antarctic research and strategic capability over a decade. He did mention another commitment that was consistent with the budget’s focus on regional Australia: $148.6m for community solar and wind microgrids in areas too remote to have access to the power grid. The budget papers say this will contribute to a $2bn improvement in the budget bottom line over the next four years. Most, but not all, of that funding has been promised to top up funding for the clean energy agencies, which were created a decade ago under a deal between Labor, the Greens and independents.

Explore the last week