Chris Richardson

And, you know, you can understand some of it.

There were policies, there's new policy stuff, some of it's defence, some of it's, you know, fuel security, some of it's pharmaceutical benefits, some of it's, well, governments do spend more when inflation goes up and the economy weakens.

Some of it is the continuing blowout in the NDIS that put the boot up the bum of the government to get more serious on reform then.

But that increase in spending, five months ago, the expectation was that spending in the year just about to start by the federal government would increase by 3.1%.

As at the budget, they said, well, hang on, we now think it's going to be 5.3%.

And I do think that will have raised a couple of eyebrows at the Reserve Bank.

So, you know, yes, the Reserve will be quite happy there wasn't a big cost of living package.

We have not repeated those mistakes.

The states, though, are still throwing some money around and the feds are spending more than they had said they were going to do last time they updated us.

So there are three standout things that you can do.

You mentioned one of them.

That's to have a better, a stronger long-term budget so that we're handing on less debt to the generations that follow.

To be fair to this budget, it does that.

To be less fair, it gets there over the longer term by assuming we'll be able to make some pretty big savings in the NDIS.

And that's going to be hard to do.

And certainly the speed of the turnaround that the government is looking for on the spend on the NDIS is pretty fast.

So it's hard to find too many people here in Canberra who think that that will be achievable.

So yes, you can improve the fairness over generations by being more careful with the longer term budget.

There's been a bit of that in this budget.

You can be fair to younger Australians if you give, and you've mentioned it a few times, if you give greater potential around growth.