Federal Budget 2023: Albanese Govt’s second Budget focuses on people but fails to confront structural issues

The easiest way to characterise the Albanese Government’s second Budget is that it is about people rather than things. With the possible exception of Andrew Forrest, any West Australian looking to the Commonwealth for shiny new buildings and roads will be left bitterly disappointed. Forrest will start a raging favourite for a substantial share of the new $2 billion Hydrogen Headstart program, which will subsidise the early production costs of “flagship projects” seeking to turn long-held green hydrogen dreams into reality. The remainder of the State can comfort itself with a $350 electricity credit — which will surely be extended to all West Aussies by Mark McGowan on Thursday — and the central role WA has played in handing the Albanese Government the means to substantially enhance a range of welfare measures. Buoyant commodity prices, including iron ore and LNG, helped deliver what just six months ago was an unthinkable $4 billion surplus. Combine that with the pandemic’s legacy of heightened expectations of government, and a numbing of the national psyche to spiralling debt, and Anthony Albanese found himself with a small window to ramp up spending on Medicare and social security. For someone who grew up in public housing in a single-parent home, that opportunity was understandably irresistible. But seizing it came at the expense of the kinds of major cash injections into Metronet and regional roads West Australians came to expect from the Coalition. Unlike those one-off infrastructure sugar hits, it also bakes into future Budgets major ongoing spending. That comes at the same time costs are blowing out on defence, the NDIS, aged care and debt repayments. Two budgets in, Albanese and his Cabinet are yet to confront those structural issues. That will require difficult choices about both people and things. And they are choices that cannot be put off forever.