Treasurer Jim Chalmers has delivered Labor's first budget in a decade, with a focus on the future.
But the Treasurer also looked back into the past and made some claims about debt, wages, apprentices and energy.
So did he get his facts straight? Read on to find out.
The history of debt
Echoing claims of his own and his colleagues both prior to and following the May election, Mr Chalmers singled out debt as a major concern for the government, noting that relative to gross domestic product it is at a level not seen for decades.
"Speaker, Australians do not have enough to show for a trillion dollars of debt, and gross debt as a share of GDP at its highest level in more than 70 years," the treasurer said.
Fact Check previously took aim at Mr Chalmers for a similar claim he made following the April budget handed down by the former government, and found prime minister Anthony Albanese and finance minister Katy Gallagher to be "wrong" when they made similar statements.
This time, however, Mr Chalmers is closer to the mark.
That's because while the treasurer and his colleagues — as well as former deputy liberal leader Julie Bishop all the way back in 2015 — previously suggested that debt as a share of GDP had never been higher, Mr Chalmers has this time noted the ratio has reached its highest level in 70 years.
According to the budget papers, debt as a share of GDP measured 39 per cent in June 2022, and is forecast to grow as high as 43.1 per cent by the end of 2025-26.
Historical data collated by Fact Check shows that gross debt as a proportion of GDP last reached more than 39 per cent in the 1954-55 financial year — 67 years ago — when it was 41.6 per cent.
A year prior, debt represented 44 per cent of GDP, higher than any year in the forward estimates.
As for Mr Chalmers's claim that Australia has "a trillion dollars of debt", an analysis published earlier this week by Fact Check found that when it came to gross debt, the trillion dollar figure had yet to be reached, but was forecast to be surpassed by the end of 2023-24.
The updated figures contained in this week's budget do not change this finding.
Are real wages lower than they were 10 years ago?
The Coalition's track record on wage growth — or a lack thereof — was a central theme of Mr Chalmers's address.
"If there's one fact that sums up nearly a decade of wasted opportunities and warped priorities, it is this: real wages are lower today than they were 10 years ago," he told parliament.
In a later interview on ABC TV, he said Australia had experienced "a decade of wage stagnation".
This echoed a 2021 claim by then opposition leader Anthony Albanese that real wages had "flatlined" for eight years. Fact Check found that claim to be close to the mark.
Earlier fact checks also examined the topic, with the Wage Price Index published by the Australian Bureau of Statistics considered the best measure for wage growth over time.
The WPI can be converted into "real" terms, that is, adjusted to account for inflation, by using the Consumer Price Index, also published by the ABS.
The most recent data available for both the WPI and the CPI is for June 2022. It shows that annual growth in the WPI, at 2.6 per cent, was much lower than annual growth in the CPI of 6.1 per cent. In other words, real wages fell.
The chart below illustrates that real wages have been falling since June 2020.
The chart sets September 1997 at an index of 100 and shows the most recent measure is 111.3.
Ten years ago, in June 2012, the real wage price index was indeed slightly higher, measuring 112.1.
Has the number of apprenticeships completed dropped 20,000 since 2012?
Making his case for an investment in vocational education, Mr Chalmers claimed that far fewer people were completing apprenticeships now than when Labor was last in government.
"In 2012, more than 57,000 Australians completed a trade apprenticeship. By 2021, that number had dropped by more than 20,000," he said.
Debate in the leadup to the March 2022 federal budget featured competing claims about the Coalition's record on vocational education, during which Fact Check found one of Labor's claims — that there were 70,000 fewer apprentices and trainees in training — to be "spin".
Unlike that claim, however, in his budget speech Mr Chalmers referred only to trade apprentices (rather than combined apprentices and trainees), and spoke of completions rather than the number of people in training.
And his numbers check out.
According to the latest official data, which is published by the National Centre for Vocational Education, 57,900 people completed a trade apprenticeship during the 12 months to June 2012.
By June 2021, that number had indeed fallen by just over 20,000, to reach 37,300.
When Fact Check last covered the topic, experts said the reasons behind the changing numbers were complex, ranging from the uncapping of university places to the long-term decline of manufacturing.
Are renewables cheaper?
Mr Chalmers sought to highlight contrasts between Labor and the former Coalition government's energy policies, which he described as "frustrating".
"Our plan drives investment in renewable energy — which is cheaper energy," he said.
Fact Check has previously compared the cost of renewable energy with fossil fuels for new energy generation, finding it was generally cheaper to produce electricity from wind or solar sources than it would be using a new coal or nuclear plant.
This held for renewable projects both with and without "storage".
That finding was based on a 2018 report released by the national science agency CSIRO and the energy market operator AEMO which uses a measure of the "levelised cost of electricity".
This measure incorporates the cost of capital, among other things, to determine the average cost of producing electricity from a specific generating technology.
The 2018 CSIRO/AEMO report found that that levelised cost for power produced by a new black coal-fired station would have a mid-point of $96.60 per megawatt hour. Energy from a new brown coal-fired power station would be higher, at $107.40.
For renewables, the levelised cost was found to have mid-points of $53 for solar and $57.80 for wind.
"Our data confirms that while existing fossil fuel power plants are competitive due to their sunk capital costs, solar and wind generation technologies are currently the lowest-cost ways to generate electricity for Australia, compared to any other new-build technology," said the report's lead author, CSIRO's chief energy economist Paul Graham, when it was released.
"At a global level, the investment costs of a wide range of low emission generation technologies are projected to continue to fall, and we found new-build renewable generation to be least cost, including when we add the cost of two or six hours of energy storage to wind and solar."
An update to that report released in July 2022, "confirms past years' findings that wind and solar are the cheapest source of electricity generation and storage in Australia, even when considering additional integration costs arising due to the variable output of renewables, such as energy storage and transmission".
It said renewables remained the cheapest new-build electricity generation option in Australia, "although inflation and supply chain disruptions will likely put cost reductions on hold for the next year".
