Tuesday’s budget will forecast a surplus of about $4 billion for this financial year – the first Commonwealth budget surplus in a decade and a half.
The budget projects an improvement of more than $143 billion over four years to 2025-26 compared to the Coalition’s final budget, brought down in March last year by Josh Frydenberg.
The budget was last in surplus in Coalition Prime Minister John Howard’s final year – 2007-2008. After the global financial crisis threw it into deficit, in 2019 Frydenberg declared the budget “back in black”, but the COVID support measures meant the promised surplus was never achieved.
