Federal budgets are about choices – what spending to prioritise, what to cut. With questions mounting over Australia’s nuclear submarine deal – Aukus – we took a look through the budget papers to see what one nuclear sub would buy us.
There are a few caveats to make, including that we don’t know what the final figure will be for the nuclear subs for almost another two decades. We took the estimated figure when the deal was announced and divided it by the potential number of submarines: eight.
Reducing the lowest marginal tax rate from 16% to 15% next year, and then to 14% the year after was the centrepiece of this year’s budget. But even this won’t get you half a nuclear sub.
It takes adding the already announced $8.4bn to juice GP bulk billing, $2.6bn for wage increases for aged care nurses, almost $2bn set aside for disaster relief and the first stage of the better and fairer schools agreement to get you closer.
We included an estimated $5.5bn to increase jobseeker by 33% to get us over the line.
