Australian Budget Labelled an Election Budget

The threat of early elections has driven Australia’s ruling conservative government to cater the budget to its core constituencies, small businesses and middle class families with children, at the expense of structural reforms, analysts said.

“It looks like an election budget – the government has substantially spent on this budget and pushed off returning to a surplus into the distance,” University of Sydney’s lecturer in politics & public policy, Peter Chen, told CNBC. “This is not an economists’ budget but a political budget…and all the major provisions are aimed at the coalition’s base.”

For more than a decade, Australia’s economy has been fuelled by a mining boom – but a collapse in commodity prices is slowing economic growth and reducing tax receipts.

CNBC

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