Australia

3376 readers

245 users here now

A place to discuss Australia and important Australian issues.

Before you post:

If you're posting anything related to:

The Environment, post it to Aussie Environment
Politics, post it to Australian Politics
World News/Events, post it to World News
A question to Australians (from outside) post it to Ask an Australian

If you're posting Australian News (not opinion or discussion pieces) post it to Australian News

Rules

This community is run under the rules of aussie.zone. In addition to those rules:

When posting news articles use the source headline and place your commentary in a separate comment

Banner Photo

Congratulations to @[email protected] who had the most upvoted submission to our banner photo competition

Recommended and Related Communities

Be sure to check out and subscribe to our related communities on aussie.zone:

Plus other communities for sport and major cities.

https://aussie.zone/communities

Moderation

Since Kbin doesn't show Lemmy Moderators, I'll list them here. Also note that Kbin does not distinguish moderator comments.

Additionally, we have our instance admins: @[email protected] and @[email protected]

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Whether Australia’s budget has a surplus tells us little about the government’s worth – it’s all on the choices made | Greg Jericho (www.theguardian.com)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

3 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] saltesc 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

We don't want surplus unless times ahead seem economically unstable enough that saving up is a better idea than progressing

[–] abhibeckert 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Things are incredibly unstable right now and this surplus is evidence of that. Just a few years ago we had deficits around $100b.

The budget was designed to create a surplus of $4b which would have given government the ability to start thinking about how to recover from the recent massive defecits.

But because of the instability, the budget estimates were way off the mark — a large part of that was companies raising prices and making higher profits, therefore paying more tax. That's both something the government has no control over and also something the government tried to prevent.