Australian Politics
Budget 2022: Treasurer Jim Chalmers warns of deep spending cuts, more taxes
Amid all the talk, the grim reality is obvious. The government continues to spend up big and there will be no halt to to the rise in cost of living. Given the spending committments that the government treated as baked-in, no other budget was possible.
The government will continue to print money to cover its excess spending so more inflation is coming. Australians are in for a grim trot. Only people who get their savings out of money (e.g. buy company shares) are going to have any hope of protecting them. Only a big cut in government spending could have stopped the rise in cost of living -- but that was never on the cards
The Treasurer laid the ground for deeper cuts in the future but provided no additional cost of living support for struggling households other than existing policies offering cheaper childcare and medicines that won’t begin until next year.
Delivering Labor’s first budget since 2013, Dr Chalmers told The Australian it was yet to be determined how the government would tackle the structural deficit but signalled there would be a combination of new taxes and spending cuts.
“We’ve always seen this as the first of three or four budgets this term,” Dr Chalmers said.
“We set that up deliberately. We’re putting the foundations down. There’s an element of conditioning people to understand that we’ve had budgets for a really long time now where there hasn’t been a savings effort.
“There hasn’t been an effort to return commodity-fuelled revenue upgrades. We’ve made a good start because we’ve done something different in those revenue upgrades; we’ve done something different on savings. That’s a good start.”
The budget papers paint a pessimistic debt and deficit picture over the decade, with $11bn in higher deficits expected in 2024-25 and 2025-26. As a proportion of GDP, the deficit is worse in 2032-33 than the current financial year. Treasury also warns the nation risks falling into recession should key budget assumptions prove too optimistic, with growth slumping to just 0.75 per cent next financial year if inflation peaks one percentage point higher in December or the global downturn is more severe.
Treasury warned of a double whammy effect, noting the downside scenarios for both growth and unemployment from higher inflation at home “would be greater if these risks occurred simultaneously with global risks”.
Treasury expects sharp spikes from 2026-27 in the cost of the ballooning NDIS and servicing debt, which will peak in mid-2026 at $1.16 trillion or 43.1 per cent of GDP.
In a shock for households and businesses, retail electricity prices will increase by an average of 20 per cent nationally in late 2022 and a further 30 per cent in 2023-24. Domestic wholesale gas prices will remain more than double their average prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with retail gas prices increasing by up to 20 per cent in both 2022-23 and 2023-24.
The budget said electricity and gas prices were expected to directly contribute 0.75 per cent and one percentage point to inflation in 2022–23 and 2023–24 respectively.
Dr Chalmers said the government would take action in the market to keep prices lower.
“Any responsible government facing these sort of price hikes needs to consider a broader suite of regulatory intervention than they might have considered in times gone by,” he said.
Peter Dutton said millions of Australians would pay the price for a “big-taxing, big-spending” budget. The Business Council of Australia, Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry and Australian Industry Group said more must be done to drive economic growth and tackle structural spending pressures.
Rental costs will jump “considerably” in the next two years and fuel inflation amid stronger population growth and limited housing stock. A new housing accord between governments, investors and industry announced by Dr Chalmers on Tuesday, backed with an initial $350m pledge, has an ambition of building “one million new, well-located homes over five years from 2024”.
Dr Chalmers said the accord must be driven by the market, despite concerns that cashed-up superannuation funds will struggle to deliver investment returns for members.
Finance Minister Katy Gallagher, whose pre-budget audit slashed $22bn from Coalition-era programs which were redirected to fund Labor policies, told The Australian the trajectory of budget pressures were “keeping her up”.
Senator Gallagher’s audit sets up a fight with Nationals and regional Liberal MPs after the budget canned dozens of Coalition projects and grants programs and redirected a chunk of $6.5bn in infrastructure savings to climate change projects.
In his first budget speech, Dr Chalmers told parliament that 92 per cent of the $132.5bn in upgraded tax receipts over the next four years had been banked.
But the budget sugar hit, which cut the 2022-23 deficit by $41bn to $36.9bn, is expected to unravel ahead of the 2025 federal election as unemployment and inflation spike and wages and economic growth stagnate.
Compared with the pre-election fiscal outlook, Labor’s policy decisions have added $9.7bn to the budget bottom line. Treasury projects tax-to-GDP levels of 24.1 per cent by 2032-33, which ends the Coalition-era policy of maintaining taxes within a 23.9 per cent tax-to-GDP cap.
Dr Chalmers painted a grim outlook for Australians who “know there are hard days to come and hard decisions to accompany them”, as Russia’s war in Ukraine, China’s slowdown, higher interest rates and inflation bite. He released a “five-point plan for cost-of-living relief” amid growing political pressure on Labor to deliver on their promises to slash $275 from electricity bills by 2025 and lift wages.
The $5.4bn changes to childcare subsidies start from July next year, cheaper medicines from January and the full paid parental leave scheme from 2026. Labor’s five-point plan also includes “more affordable housing and getting wages moving again”.
In his speech, Dr Chalmers lamented that real wages were lower now than 10 years ago.
“Wages are growing faster now than they were before the election, but that welcome news is tempered by rising electricity prices and grocery bills eating into pay packets,” he said.
“When that inflation moderates, real wages are expected to start growing again in 2024.
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Confidence through censorship: The (medical) Ministry of Truth
On Wednesday, October 12, the Queensland Labor government – with support from the LNP opposition – passed a dystopian and dangerous bill.
The Health Practitioner Regulation National Law and Other Legislation Amendment Bill 2022 refocuses the guiding principles of medicine to prioritise public confidence over public health and safety. It allows bureaucrats to name and shame doctors, a move which the AMA described as ‘incoherent zealotry’.
This bill, if passed by other jurisdictions in Australia, will essentially legislate national medical censorship as a means to ensure public confidence in government health services.
Adherence to the Good Medical Practice code of conduct means that advocating for patients (which is our primary concern) is being overridden by external demands to comply with public health messaging. Our code of conduct is predicated on The Hippocratic Oath, the Declaration of Geneva, and the International Code of Ethics which outlines our dedication to serving humanity: To first do no harm, making our patients our primary consideration.
Political-based medicine has now replaced evidence-based medicine.
History has proven that unquestioning compliance to government directives is dangerous. In 1947, the World Medical Association agreements were formed in the aftermath of the second world war due to the gross systematic human rights abuses which took place under enforced national laws. Tragically, the political currents in Australia appear to be heading towards bureaucratic medical compliance enforced through regulatory threats, soon to be legislative threats.
In 2015, the federal government passed The Australian Border Force Act 2015 which made doctors who advocated for their refugee patients liable to face up to two years imprisonment. Doctors for Refugees challenged this law in the High Court a year later. A major basis for their argument, according to their submission to the Medical Board’s 2018 Code of Conduct review, was that the Code doctors had sworn to uphold and advocate for the rights of their patients could not be overridden by the vagaries of domestic laws.
The government eventually backed down on this law and had that problematic section repealed.
Interestingly, their submission was in response to the Medical Board attempting to insert into the medical code the concerning phrase ‘doctors must comply with relevant laws’. The response to the word comply was fierce as the idea that the medical code of conduct could enforce compliance to political decree was antithetical to what doctors had sworn to uphold.
With the arrival of Covid came the bureaucratic decree through the March 9, 2021 joint statement by AHPRA and the National Boards that made undermining public confidence in the government’s Covid public health messaging equivalent to professional misconduct. Questioning ‘the message’ is now subject to investigation and disciplinary action, including immediate suspension of registration.
Letters received by practitioners who have questioned the government response to Covid are chilling in their implication. After being suspended by National Boards under the immediate action clauses for allegedly being a threat to public health and safety, they are accused of the crime of non-compliance. They are deemed a threat because they failed to comply with public health orders, undermined the Board’s position on the promotion of Covid vaccination, and undermined public confidence because their medical expert opinion contravened government health authorities.
In summary, health professionals are not permitted to question the ‘secret health advice’ without losing their registration to practise.
Consider that in response to Covid, our health bureaucracy overturned the medical industry’s well-researched 2019 pandemic preparedness plans – doing almost the total opposite of what was recommended by health professionals. Interestingly, Dr Rochelle Walensky, Director of the CDC, told employees recently: ‘To be frank, we are responsible for some pretty dramatic, pretty public mistakes from testing, to data, to communications.’
In December 2020, the FDA outlined, ‘At this time, data is not available to make a determination about how long the vaccine will provide protection, nor is there evidence that the vaccine prevents transmission of SARS-CoV-2 from person to person.’ Our health bureaucrats, regulatory agencies, and politicians mandated provisionally approved vaccines by telling the population repeatedly that they stopped transmission and people were selfish granny killers if they didn’t get jabbed.
We, as health professionals, are not allowed to question government statements on transmission without losing our registration to practise.
On September 2021, a delegate of the Secretary of the Department of Health rescheduled ivermectin, in effect banning it for use as an off-label treatment option for Covid stating ‘subsection 52E(1) of the Therapeutic Goods Act 1989, in particular paragraph (f), which empowers the Secretary to act on any other matters that the Secretary considers necessary to protect public health’.
Ivermectin is one of the World Health Organisation’s list of essential medicines. It was fully approved by the TGA and found to be very safe according to their own 2013 Australian Public Assessment Report for Ivermectin. Two of the reasons the TGA gave for denying Australians access to a drug that showed great promise in the treatment and prevention of Covid-19 was that it was all of a sudden unsafe and its availability might dissuade people from getting vaccinated. Behaviour modification was undertaken, with the TGA appearing to act in partnership with other government nudge units to promote vaccination.
We as health professionals are not permitted to advocate for ivermectin without losing our registration to practice.
In July 2021, as Australians were being mandated through coercive techniques to get vaccinated with poorly tested provisionally approved gene-based vaccines that our Health bureaucrats and politicians repeatedly told us had been proven safe and effective, the TGA was amending the Therapeutic Goods Regulation Act to further reduce the safety and efficacy requirements for any medicine that is for the treatment or prevention of Covid. Not only do manufacturers have six years to provide the government with safety and efficacy data on these provisionally approved jabs, they also no longer have to demonstrate they could provide a greater benefit than other available medicines or that the medicine is likely to provide a major therapeutic advance.
We, as health professionals, are not allowed to question the safety and efficacy without losing our registration to practise.
Recently, the TGA has granted provisional approval to Moderna for the active immunisation and prevention of Covid in high-risk babies and young children. The report concluded the vaccinations had low levels of protective efficacy against infection, they didn’t know how long any efficacy lasted, and while the (Advisory Committee on Vaccines) recommended the provisional approval to children at high risk they noted high-risk children were excluded from the study. Across the world, pandemic policy and guidelines vary. Denmark is no longer recommending vaccination for people under 50, Norway no one under 65, but our regulatory body is expanding approvals to 6-month to 4-year-olds.
We, as health professionals, are not allowed to question this approval without losing our registration to practise.
Whenever governments want to enact laws to suppress free expression, censor and punish dissenters through threats to careers and livelihood, to control public perception as a means of creating confidence through enforced public ignorance, it is time to ask some serious questions.
If this bill passes nationally and the government becomes the single authority on all health advice, then unquestioning compliance becomes the new accepted standard of good medical practice. That is the end of medicine and the death of science. George Orwell’s Ministry of Truth has arrived. Public confidence in politicians and their bureaucrats should never come at the expense of people’s right to full, free, and unhindered access to scientific evidence and emerging data.
The Australian Medical Professionals Society is dedicated to fighting for medical free speech for the safety of those we swore to protect, our patients. Prioritising public confidence in government through censorship has led to what Professor Bhattacharya has said is the single biggest public health mistake in human history. With Dr Aseem Malhotra, a British Cardiologist, recently describing the mandates as ‘perhaps the greatest miscarriage of medical science we will witness in our lifetime’. We must stop medical censorship and allow doctors to be doctors. This bill is dangerous to the future of medicine and the health of our nation.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/10/confidence-through-censorship-the-medical-ministry-of-truth/
*********************************************Energy cost a big issue
Calls for a national energy summit to address soaring energy costs are increasing after the budget predicted consumer prices would soar by 56 per cent.
Joel Gibson from the consumer network OneBigSwitch said the energy price crisis should now be the government’s top priority if Australia was to avoid similar scenes to the UK, where 40 retailers had gone bust and price caps had doubled.
“The budget was an opportunity to address the biggest cost of living crisis we face right now - energy bills - but the government has elected to kick the can down the road,” Mr Gibson said.
“We now need a national summit to deal with this issue. Business as usual won’t cut it. If we don’t ring the bell now, we’ll have millions of Aussies who can’t afford to turn the lights on.”
While the NGO sector generally welcomed Budget measures in areas such as child care, aged care and housing, there were strong concerns about the day-to-day cost of living increases. Besides the predictions of soaring energy prices, the Budget also pointed to likely increases in the cost of food and vegetables because of October floods in eastern Australia.
Mission Australia’s CEO Sharon Callister said: “As cost of living and housing pressures go through the roof, people who rely on income support are unable to pay for many of the essentials of life.”
Opposition Treasury spokesperson Angus Taylor slammed the government over rising cost of living pressures.
“The Budget confirms that electricity and gas prices are expected to rise sharply over the next two years. Treasury has assumed retail electricity prices will increase by 50 per cent. Retail gas prices are up some 40 per cent in 2022 and 2023,” he said.
“Despite Labor’s pre-election promise to reduce your power prices by $275 a year, their own budget papers contradict this claim, and the Government has no plan to address rising prices.”
The price hike amounts to a 56 per cent rise over two years due to the increase compounding each year.
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‘Over-designed’ government megaprojects are bad for environment and taxpayers
NSW megaprojects are being over-engineered with tonnes of unnecessary, costly materials driving up the price and carbon footprint of the multibillion-dollar builds, Infrastructure Minister Rob Stokes has warned.
Stokes said NSW would fail to reach its goal of a net zero economy by 2050 without addressing overservicing in its $110-billion infrastructure pipeline, where concrete and steel are being superfluously added to projects.
Carbon emissions from construction material – including concrete and steel – are estimated to represent up to 10 per cent of Australia’s carbon output. A new report produced by Stokes and Infrastructure NSW has flagged including those emissions in the business cases of future projects.
“We want things to be robust and well-built, but that shouldn’t mean just throwing more concrete and steel into our bridges, roads and railways,” Stokes told the Herald.
“There is an irony here. Because we’ve got very conservative design standards we’re actually putting more concrete and steel into roads and bridges and railways than anyone else in the world.”
Stokes pointed to the recent construction of the multibillion-dollar Metro rail lines as an example of a project that could have used less material without impacting design integrity.
“I think there is a general awareness that we have been very conservative and over-designed some of our station boxes on Metro lines,” he said.
The government is spending tens of billions of dollars on the Metro, which will connect the CBD to the west and south-west of the city, as well as a line to service the new Western Sydney Airport when it opens in 2026. The projects have been hampered by cost blowouts.
Station boxes are excavated for underground platforms, concourses and facilities, while major developments are often installed above them.
Infrastructure funding cuts leave NSW behind Victoria, Queensland
Stokes said a “compliance culture” in NSW had led to an intense focus on mitigating risk and liability in both the government and private sectors.
“I think every engineer that touches a project on the way through … just wants to ensure that their responsibility is entirely mitigated by throwing a bit of extra concrete and steel at it,” he said.
“The sum total of all these little decisions where people are just effectively covering their back means that we’re paying way over the odds, and also contributing toward global climate emissions because of our innate design conservatism, so we need to challenge that.”
The senior minister, who will retire from politics at the next state election, said that more thoughtfully designing the state’s largest projects would cut emissions, save time and taxpayer cash.
“We should be very proud of the fact that we are designing very, very robust structures, but the question we need to ask is, ‘Are we over designing them?’. There’s a cost imperative to that for the taxpayer,” he said.
“But there’s also a climate imperative because every bit of extra design constraint that adds to the bulk of a structure is making it more carbon intensive.”
The Infrastructure NSW discussion paper, set to be released this week, recommends a whole of government approach to measuring emissions in infrastructure.
The Decarbonising Infrastructure Delivery report says multibillion-dollar investment decisions were being made without any understanding of carbon mitigation or management over the life of the asset. It warns that could result in potentially higher costs to retrofit projects to achieve net-zero in the future.
The report also recommends maximising the use of recycled material in building.
The United Kingdom, including the Glasgow Airport Investment Area, and Europe are cited as examples of governments including the carbon impact of projects when weighing up their benefits and cost.
The NSW government earlier this year warned it would need to push back some of its mammoth infrastructure pipeline amid rising construction costs and limited workforce.
The government paper follows a report produced by Infrastructure Partnerships Australia which earlier this year called for ambitious, lower-carbon outcome requirements in major projects.
Stokes said future state governments would need to rethink the way they approached big projects, and instead start by questioning whether they should even go ahead at all.
“One of the very best ways we can decarbonise infrastructure is actually asking whether we need such an expensive megaproject design intervention in the first place. Maybe there are other ways to achieve the same objective,” he said.
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM -- daily)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Evelyn Rae, a conservative Australian political commentator
Margo Robbie -- a beautiful australian
My son Joe at ANU
One of the happiest pictures ever -- Cleo Smith, aged 4
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