Treasurer Jim Chalmers will unveil his second budget on Tuesday.
It follows his “mini-budget” in October, which was released five months after Labor won the May election.
Aside from registering a surplus for the first time in 15 years, Tuesday’s budget will be far more substantial for policy announcements, and we already have a pretty good idea of what’s in it.
Here are some of the biggest policies that have been flagged ahead of time.
Almost $15 billion in cost of living relief will be a big element of Tuesday’s budget.
The package will be spent over the next four years, and will include $1.5 billion in electricity bill relief for 5.5 million households and about 1 million small businesses.
Pensioners, people on other income support payments, and small businesses will have their energy bills subsidised by up to $500.
But the size of the rebates won’t be the same for everyone.
They’ll be determined by where you live in Australia because the government has struck eight different deals with different state and territory governments to share the cost of the rebates.
Mr Chalmers says the cost of living package, as a whole, has been designed in such a way that it won’t add to inflation.
The federal government plans to change the dispensing rules at pharmacies so people can buy two months’ worth of medicines on a single prescription, with the change affecting more than 300 common medicines.
The current rule is that only 30 days’ supply of medicine is able to be supplied to patients.
But Health Minister Mark Butler says that under the 30-day rule, given that GPs can issue a script with five repeats, a patient with a chronic disease will, at the very least, have to visit their GP twice a year and make 12 visits to the pharmacist a year to get their medicines, and make a co-payment to the pharmacist each time.
He says the rule change will halve the number of visits people have to make to a pharmacist, cutting the cost of medicine.
The advice to make the change came from the Pharmaceutical Benefits Advisory Committee (and it dates back to 2018).
Mr Butler announced the plan last month.
The Pharmacist Guild of Australia has reacted angrily to the plan and has been campaigning against it. But the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners says it’s a “win for patients“.
The federal government passed its cheaper childcare package through parliament in November, so it will be included in this budget.
The lower childcare costs will start flowing from July, at the start of the new financial year.
It will provide cheaper child care for about 1.2 million families.
It will see Child Care Subsidy rates lift to 90 per cent for families on a combined income of $80,000 or less.
For families earning over $80,000, the subsidy rate will taper down by 1 percentage point for every additional $5,000 of family income until the subsidy reaches 0 per cent for families earning $530,000.
A typical family earning about $120,000 with a child in care three days a week will save about $1,700 a year.
The existing measure that provides a higher Child Care Subsidy rate to families with multiple children aged five or under in care will be retained.
It will see total spending on subsidies of $55.3 billion over the next four years.
The government will also expand access to financial support for single parents by raising the age cut-off for the Parenting Payment (Single) from eight years to 14, at a cost of $1.9 billion over four years.
The government will provide $11.3 billion to fund a 15 per cent pay rise for aged care workers.
It will accept the ruling from the Fair Work Commission that the pay rise should be delivered in one go, rather than in increments.
Aged Care Minister Anika Wells says workers will get an extra $7,000 annually from the pay rise.
This one is potentially very important.
The federal government says it wants to make Australia a “renewable energy superpower” and late last week it announced a plan to establish a “Net Zero Authority” to make it happen.
Tuesday’s budget will include some details of the plan.
The new agency will be asked to help workers in coal-dominated regions to find employment and access new skills training as the economy transitions away from fossil fuels towards renewable energy.
It will help communities attract new clean energy industries and support investors with those opportunities.
It will also coordinate policies and programs across government departments to help different regions of Australia attract new clean energy industries.
Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen unveiled the plan on Friday.
“We want it to be a one-stop shop for workers who are thinking about the transformation [and] how they prepare for the jobs of the future,” he said at the time.
The budget will include funding for the government’s new National Anti-Corruption Commission (NACC).
The legislation to create the NACC passed federal parliament in November, and the government committed $262.6 million over four years to support its establishment.
Every state and territory already has a form of anti-corruption or integrity commission, so the Commonwealth had been a laggard in this area until now.
The commission will investigate and report on serious or systemic corruption in the Commonwealth public sector, refer evidence of criminal corrupt conduct for prosecution, and undertake education and prevention activities regarding corruption.
It will have powers similar to a royal commission.
This is a tough area for the government.
It has been under increasing pressure from welfare groups, social policy experts, and some economists to raise the rate of the JobSeeker payment to levels that are far more equitable.
The government has announced it’s scrapping the Parents Next program, ending compulsory mutual obligations for about 100,000 parents who were forced into the program.
It is also expected to increase JobSeeker payments slightly for older long-term unemployed people, for people aged over 55.
But Mr Chalmers says there will be more announcements in the budget in the welfare area.
The government says it will cost about $19 billion over an initial four-year period to start implementing the recent defence strategic review’s recommendations.
That includes $9 billion for the AUKUS nuclear-powered submarine project and $4.1 billion for missiles and manufacturing.
The government says it will recoup some of those costs through $7.8 billion of downgraded and scrapped projects.
It adds to Australia’s commitment to the controversial nuclear submarine program, which is estimated to cost between $268 billion and $368 billion over the next 30 years.
As part of that figure, $8 billion will be spent on upgrading the naval base HMAS Stirling in Western Australia.abcnews
