“Restraint” – that’s what Treasurer Jim Chalmers claimed as the watchword of Tuesday’s federal budget. Perhaps the claim can be made in general, but when it comes to transport infrastructure, the budget is remarkable not for how different it is to budgets past, but how similar. It has left plenty of opportunities for actual restraint for next time around, in May 2023.
The first similarity to budgets past is how much is being committed to transport infrastructure.
This year the total is about 0.6% of GDP, much like Josh Frydenberg’s budgets of the past three years. That equates to A$13.4 billion this year, rising to about A$15 billion for each of the next three years.
