Al-anwar Newspaper English news in Australia
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is set to hand down his first budget on Tuesday, October 25, in the face of soaring inflation and a dark outlook for the global economy.
Treasurer Jim Chalmers has warned Australians to brace for spending cuts and limited cost-of-living relief, even as grocery prices are tipped to skyrocket following devastating floods.
But Labor has refused to cancel the former government’s stage three tax cuts – meaning some 600,000 high-income earners will be better off by up to $9075 per year when the changes come into effect in 2024-25.
“There will be a substantial impact on the cost of living [from the floods], there will be a substantial impact on the budget and there’s no pretending otherwise,” Dr Chalmers told the Nine’s Today on Tuesday.
“We don’t yet know what the full impact will be on the cost of living, we don’t yet know how many billions of dollars this flood and its recovery will cost. What we don’t want to do, and we’ve seen this overseas, is provide cost-of-living relief in a way that just creates more inflation and pushes interest rates up higher than they would otherwise be.”
Dr Chalmers pointed to the UK, where Prime Minister Liz Truss and Chancellor of the Exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng’s tax-cutting mini-budget last month caused chaos in money markets and brought the country’s pensions schemes to the brink of implosion.
“The UK government itself is recognising that perhaps they got this balance wrong and they’re trying to recalibrate their settings,” he said.
“That is an important lesson for all of us. What we’ve tried to do is make sure that the cost-of-living relief that we give doesn’t make the job of the Reserve Bank harder.”
Labor went to the May federal election promising around $1.3 billion in spending cuts to Coalition programs.
Dr Chalmers last week compared waste in the budget he inherited to “barnacles on a ship” that he must remove, The Sydney Morning Herald reported.
“The rorts and waste in the budget have been like barnacles on a ship and we need to scrape them off,” he told the newspaper.
