Australians should expect more bad news, Treasurer says after federal budget revealed

Jim Chalmers has hinted there are more “hard decisions” to come, with this year’s budget only the beginning of cuts to government spending.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers has delivered a budget he says “makes hard decisions for hard times”, but he has flagged tonight’s package is the “start” of reigning in the spending.

“We’ve got an issue with the budget; we’ve got big, persistent, structural spending issues in the budget,” the Treasurer told 7:30 in a post-budget interview.

“When you’re climbing a mountain of this height, you need to start somewhere; that’s what we did tonight.”

Mr Chalmers says this year’s budget has ‘made more savings than recent budgets’. Picture: Martin Ollman / Getty Images

While handing down his first budget, Mr Chalmers said it “begins the hard yards of repair” through a focus on being “responsible not reckless” and not ruling out further cuts in the future.

“This is just the beginning of our budget repair work and it’s just the beginning of the conversation that we need to have as a country about economic and physical challenges,” he said in parliament.

“About the choices that we need to make on what is affordable and what is fair, so we can pay to service the debt that was left to us when borrowing costs are the fastest growing budget pressure.”

BROKEN PROMISES

Labor has been accused of breaking election promises in this year’s budget by Opposition Treasurer Angus Taylor.

“What we’ve seen in the budget is Labor saying that electricity prices are going up by 50 per cent in the next several years, and gas prices going up by 40 per cent,” Mr Taylor said on 7:30.

“That’s a major breach of an election commitment, they promised that they would go down by $275.”

Mr Taylor said that the government’s reasoning of the war in Ukraine didn’t cut it.

“The war in Ukraine happened before the election, they could’ve changed their policy and they didn’t,” he said.

Mr Chalmers flagged that there’s a “big problem” with gas and electricity prices, despite not allocating relief within the budget.

“These forecasts are relatively new to us, and the work that we need to do in this area is ongoing...we’ve got more work to do and I’m not going to pre-empt any steps that we might take,” he said.

NDIS CONFUSION

Mr Chalmers flagged the ballooning cost of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), saying the scheme’s spending trajectory is currently “putting incredible pressure on the budget”.

“It’s going to cost hundreds of billions of dollars,” he said.

Mr Chalmers said the NDIS will soon hit $50bn, before flagging the cost could reach ‘hundreds of billions of dollars’. Picture: istock

“We want to do the right thing by Australians with a disability; that means making sure that spending in the program is sustainable.”

The focus of a current review into the cost of the NDIS is ensuring it gets “value for money”, according to Mr Chalmers, not ruling out cleaving money from the scheme.

“We hope that this review that is being undertaken right now means we can improve the quality of spending over time, and then we’ll update the figures,” he said.

Labor says it will implement stage three tax cuts introduced by the previous government. Picture: istock

Mr Chalmers also did not rule out changes to Australia’s tax system in subsequent budgets.

“We have taken some important steps, I think, on multinational tax reform … that’s important, that’s a start,” he said.

“I think we should always be open to opportunities to make the budget more sustainable.”

Originally published as Australians should expect more bad news, Treasurer says after federal budget revealed