Can Albanese-Chalmers do a Hawke-Keating on budget repair?
If geopolitics worsens Australia’s pre-existing economic malaise, doing nothing about the condition of the budget could be the biggest risk of all.
The Albanese government’s appetite for budgetary discipline is being tested like never before as Australia seeks to navigate an international crisis that will exacerbate the nation’s domestic predicament of already high inflation.
A confluence of events – the global oil shock triggered by the Iran war that is intensifying cost-of-living pressures – means the May budget shapes as perhaps the most important since the one handed down 40 years ago by the Hawke-Keating Labor government.
