NSW reports another case of Japanese encephalitis; Victoria records nine Covid deaths and 9,036 new cases, NSW records six deaths and 20,050 new cases; Treasurer expected to address the cost of living in traditional pre-budget speech, while setting a path to balancing the government’s books – follow the day’s news
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Treasurer Josh Frydenberg is on the telly now (hope he’s saving some juicy bits for his speech later). He’s talking about this idea of returning to some sort of pre-Covid fiscal world. He says:
As you know, we recalibrated our budget strategy when the pandemic first hit and we needed to do that to ensure there was sufficient economic support with programs like jobkeeper, the cash flow boosts, the $750 payments to pensioners, carer, and those on income support. That helped stabilise the economy by opening up the purse strings. Now that the recovery is well underway and the unemployment rate is down to a 14-year low of 4%, it is time to move to the next phase of the budget strategy and that means stabilising debt and then reducing debt as a proportion of the overall economy, and ending those crisis-level, emergency economic support programs.
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