What does the Federal Budget mean for you?
Dr Tessa Boyd-Caine was the founding CEO of Health Justice Australia.
In this post, Tessa reflects on the Federal Budget as our biggest social policy, and why we should all be paying attention.
It’s Federal Budget season. If you would normally switch off when the talk turns to deficits and GDP, please bear with me because the bottom line for the Federal Budget is not an obscure calculation of dollars and cents; it’s actually all about you.
If the past year has taught us anything, it is how much impact governments have through the spending decisions they make. In April 2020, with the economic impacts of the Covid19 pandemic becoming clear, the Australian Government initiated the JobKeeper employment subsidy. For those whose wages it covered, the security of income in a deeply uncertain economic period was a massive relief and a critical lifeline. At the same time, the value of funding public health services was immediately clear from the public messaging around how to reduce the spread of the virus. And imagine how many more people in Australia might have contracted Covid19 if we each had to pay for our own Covid tests instead of being able to access a network of publicly funded testing clinics. These examples show the very real difference that is made in people’s lives through the decisions governments make about what to spend and where to spend it.
The importance of sustained spending
What these examples hide is how important it is to sustain spending in these areas over time. Take the effectiveness of those public heath messages to wash our hands and keep our distance. The evidence about how Covid19 spreads and the messages to reduce it have been products of the past year, but the mechanisms that enabled that knowledge to be collected, analysed and translated into public information were not put in place when the pandemic struck. Those mechanisms are our public health infrastructure that has been established, built up and developed over decades; constantly evolving in response to emerging evidence about how best to prevent disease, changing social dynamics that require different messages, and new vehicles to deliver those messages.
The same is true for the health, legal assistance and social services that people turned to for help as problems emerged over the past year: the financial counsellors who helped us deal with our credit card debt, the tenancy advisors who helped navigate rental agreements when we lost our jobs, the legal help when we we had to navigate changing terms of employment, and the family violence services that helped people who were unsafe when lockdowns forced us to stay home.
Community infrastructure
This is community infrastructure at its least visible and most vital. We tend to think about infrastructure in terms of bricks and mortar, roads and bridges, but the foundations of our service systems are just as important to our social and economic progress. It is government decisions to fund these services over time that enables their existence to help us pick up the pieces of our lives when we are in crisis; that ensures their effectiveness in helping us put those pieces back together.
Those services don’t just spring up when we need them and close down when we don’t. Health and human services are responding to needs like this every day, right across the country. They need to be funded to exist and invested in to ensure they are effective, timely and responsive to the needs of the communities they serve. These are the decisions the Government makes when it sets the Federal Budget.
The Federal Budget
At its simplest, the Federal Budget sets out the Australian Government’s priorities for spending. From the decisions that inform the Budget, we know whether we will be able to continue accessing health services by phone or online; or how much we will have to pay from our own pockets for prescription medications. The Budget determines whether we will maintain levels of income support to keep people out of poverty, such as occurred through the increased Jobseeker rate (formerly Newstart) as well as the adequacy of the Disability Support and Age Pensions. All of these decisions about expenditure impact directly upon people’s daily lives.
Even the Government’s decisions about taxation are relevant for our everyday because taxation is how governments raise the revenue that they then use to fund infrastructure and services. When a friend boasted to me about how effective he had been at avoiding taxes, I wondered whether he had spent as much effort on avoiding the use of roads, not sending his kids to school or staying away from health services – all services whose costs he was not contributing to by reducing his taxes.
The Budget is a social policy but that’s not always obvious from the focus on forecasts and figures. Through the Federal Budget, our elected officials set the priorities for what they will spend on and what they won’t. Those decisions directly shape the society we live in, and that’s everyone’s business.
