Chris Richardson

Let me just step back for a moment because the federal budget is about a quarter of all the money in Australia goes in and back out.

You can kind of think of it as is true today.

You know, every family, every community, every nation has a social compact.

The federal budget's a bit of a social compact.

We tax workers, we tax businesses, we spend it on the young and the old and the sick and the poor and defense forces and the like.

I tend to think of any budget, any social compact having two big aims, and both of them are part of the backstory to this particular budget.

So two aims are to make people better off, you know, to raise the standard of living over time, sustainably so, the sort of prosperity aim.

But there's also a fairness aim.

As a group become more prosperous over time, are we sharing those gains well?

And the true backdrop to this budget, you know, I don't necessarily think it is the inflation challenge at the moment of the Reserve Bank.

I don't necessarily think it is Iran and then the war in the Middle East.

I would step back a little further and say across our lifetimes,

Australia has been a magnificent prosperity success story.

We spent a long time with our standard of living moving up at times, including decades, faster than you saw in the US.

But in the past decade,

our living standards have barely grown.

If you look across the rich world as a whole, the average citizen in that sort of rich world club, the OECD, their living standards have gone up about 17% in the past decade.

Now, that's their income, but it's disposable income, you know, it's inflation adjusted, it's per person.

In Australia...

it's less than a third of that.