Tired of reading about the Budget? Here are the pictures
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WAYNE Swan and his mates at Treasury put a lot of effort into producing pretty graphs whose sole intention seems to be to make us feel OK about all the bad news in the Budget. There’s little that needs to be said here except that a lot of this is clearly spin, but under the very last chart below I’ve pointed out a few things worth thinking about.
The last chart above is the tax table. In last year’s Budget papers, there were pages upon pages of graphs and look-up charts showing the projected benefits of tax and family payments to every imaginable type of Australian family. This year, we just got this, which shows the improvements in incomes for a limited cross-section.
The group with the lowest percentage increase in their incomes is the single-income couple with children on 167% of average weekly earnings. Picture this family in a suburb in any major Australian city. Dad goes to work every day, mum stays at home, working just as hard to look after their two kids, who are three and eight. Dad works hard and was earning $78K in 2007-2008, enough to make ends meet, enjoy a family day at the footy from time to time, pay off the car loan and meet the mortgage commitments.
This is a typical aspirational Australian family - the working family that Kevin Rudd banged on so much about in 2007. Penbo has written more on this topic here.
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