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- What would you do with $9billion?
A trusted friend of Zee Feed (hi, Odette!) tasked us with an excellent challenge for our 2024 Federal Budget coverage: Could we reimagine the budget for a more fair and equitable society? Now, as much as I really did want to write an entire suite of policies to redirect where government revenue flows to… navigating that level of economics is not my personal strength.
But we can tackle the next best thing: The $9.3 billion surplus. As explained in our budget analysis piece this week, this is a political surplus – not a practical one. Treasure Jim Chalmers was not forced to find a surplus to ‘save’ the economy, and having put those savings on paper doesn’t change much about the next few years (except for conservative media discourse around Labor’s own electability). They could have just spent it. They should have just spent it.
Here is how a better Budget could have used the $9.3 billion surplus:
Raise the rate of Jobseeker to above the poverty line – $8.92 billion
The Henderson poverty line (for Australia in 2024) is $87 per day for a single adult. If the goal of welfare is to get people out of poverty, they need to be above this line – hence the campaign to ‘raise the rate’ to $88 per day. There are approximately 740,000 people receiving Jobseeker payments.
Jobseeker is paid at a rate of $385 per week, or $55 a day. To bring Jobseeker past the poverty line for one full year means finding an extra $33 per person per day. Some quick and dirty maths: $33 x 365 x 740,800 = $8.92 billion.
They could have paid it for the next financial year (starting July 1) just using the leftovers after everything had been accounted for.
It’s not a permanent fix, but one year out of poverty could be life changing and circuit-breaking for many Australians who are struggling right now. And that’s before you factor in the economic cost of poverty – making sure people have their essentials means they’re more likely to contribute to the economy, which is ultimately what the government wants us all to do. It would also clearly signal this Labor government is serious when it talks about ‘leaving no one behind’.
BONUS ROUND: There are about 69,000 people on Youth Allowance payments of $319 per week ($45 per day). Doing the same for them would cost another $1.1b. Admittedly this wouldn’t fit under the existing surplus BUT you know what we could do instead? Scrap the inflationary $300 electricity bill subsidy, which will cost $3.5b, and use some of that money for this instead.
Electrify 50% of the households in Australia – $6 billion
Although Jim Chalmers has tried to position the Future Made in Australia Fund as an investment in a greener economy, it does not include any money to electrify Australian houses (i.e.: replace all fossil fuel appliances, mostly gas, with electric ones.)
Rewiring Australia says it would cost $12 billion to electrify every home in Australia. That’s more than the current surplus so… why not just do half for $6b? There are many places to find the extra $3b required (more strictly enforcing the Petroleum Resources Rent Tax is just one idea).
After the 2023 Budget renowned expert Saul Griffith urged the government to commit just $2.5b to the household electric transition. Electrification can reduce household energy bills by up to $5000 a year, and household emissions by up to 64% – a win-win-win that continues to be ignored.
Double Housing Australia Future Fund, build ~30,000 affordable homes – $9.3 billion (ish)
Australia needs 400,000 affordable homes to solve the availability issues creating the housing crisis. Experts say the existing Housing Australia Future Fund (which the Greens fought hard to improve last year) could be seriously improved by doubling the funding from $10b to $20b, which would see an extra 30,000 homes built. Look, I’m being a bit cheeky here because the surplus doesn’t quite cover the gap, but these are rough, round numbers! It’s close enough!
Max Chandler-Mather, the Greens Housing representative, says if spent directly (instead of putting it in the HAFF) the $9.3b surplus could completely fund 18,600 public houses.
Given the government is way off track on all of its housing construction targets, you’d think it would want to spend every available extra dollar to keep people housed.
Look, I’m not an economist, and this is not a comprehensive list of helpful ways to spend a few billion dollars. But is is an exercise in priorities – Jim Chalmers and the Albanese government had found ways to fund the things they believe are important. It’s not that Australia “can’t afford” to do any of the above, but that our political leaders refuse to do so. A fairer, safer country is possible and we shouldn’t pretend these are fairytale ideas.
Good stuff on Zee Feed rn:
Reform, necessary change, whatever we want to call it, is not the intention of this budget. Which of course leads us to the obvious question: if not now, when? CLICK HERE TO READ.
Smart stuff on the Internet 💭
All the stuff I found on the web that made me think, smile, or have an ‘aha!’ moment. Spend your Sunday reading them – you'll be better off for it:
Tricia Figueroa’s analysis of the controversial King Charles portrait on TikTok
Incredibly accessible break down of why this portrait is so subversive, clever and truly beautiful. I’ll be thinking about Jonathan Yeo’s artwork for a long, long time.
The Unsexy But Necessary Way To Ensure A Truly Diverse Fashion Week on Refinery29
I wrote this one about how to solve the never-ending diversity problem at Australian Fashion Week. “But how do we channel that into more consistent progress? Data and reporting. It’s an unsexy but logical and necessary next phase of the journey. The only way to know if efforts to make change are having an impact is to measure them. And to measure that impact, we have to collect meaningful data.”
Why Is Feminism on the Internet Regressing? on The Swaddle
“But what does equality – that nonspecific linguistic vacuum into which all activism disappears – even mean? These were campaigns predicated on finding the most common denominator that could unite men’s sympathies with women’s interests, rather than getting to the heart of the systemic inequalities that keep men at an advantage at a cost to all women... In other words, instead of centering the most marginalized, Internet campaigns centered the most privileged.”
Meet the “digital parents” giving millions in China a vision of family love they never had on Rest of World
Rest of World does some of the best tech reporting, and it does not centre the US – seriously underrated. “The videos, which depict an idealized image of middle-class families, appeal to the unhappy children who have grown up without the same parental support… In the comment section, some followers say they are experiencing familial love for the first time. “I felt like a stray cat that got picked up and kissed,” reads a comment that was liked some 26,000 times.”
And the Gina Rineheart portraits. The billionaire does not want us to see these paintings of her, so I think that means we should all take a good look.