The budget

 Just a short note on the budget.

Firstly a surplus is when the surplus is greater than 1% of GDP. This budget is merely balanced.

Here is my mate PETER MARTIN on the budget.

As I have said previously the ALP have inherited a precarious situation as the previous government did no budget repair. By that I am referring to the structural deficit. It is hard to reduce a structural deficit of 50-$60B structural deficit AFTER the RBA has raised rates quite a bit. It is almost a recipe for recession.

When you consider how timid the current government is perhaps we should be happy with the small improvement in the structural deficit.

Let me let off some steam. I get almost angry when I hear people such as Chris Richardson and Steve Anthony who should know better claim Keating or costello have done much better than this government. Fellahs Wayne Swan holds the record easily for the tightest budget ever delivered!!

It is this financial year we need to be wary of boosting inflation and the budget is slightly contractionary. So if you think demand is the reason why inflation rose and it isn't then this budget won't exacerbate the inflation.

We need to see what and how the government will control its spending ( aged care, NDIS, defence etc) as the medium tern projections although better than originally forecast still have the budget in deficit when it needs to be in surplus. 

How I wish we had some fair dinkum politicians who could say to the punters we have to take some bad medicine if the budget is to be in surplus which it does. The reason why energy prices are high is over reliance on fossil fuels. Inflation was a supply shock. sigh