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Treasurer Jim Chalmers said the 2025-26 budget is focused on the future of the country’s economy rather than the upcoming federal election.
“Now, this is not a budget for the election. It’s a budget to build Australia’s future,” he told reporters in Canberra on Tuesday ahead of handing down his fourth budget.
He said the budget would be “responsible” with the cost of living crisis “absolutely front and centre” of it.
“It strikes the right balance between helping people with the cost of living, and investing in a more competitive, more productive and dynamic economy into the future so that we’re more resilient to these global shocks,” he said.
Chalmers said the budget, and the Australian economy, was in “much better condition than we found them three years ago”.
“We’ve got the Liberal debt down by $177 billion, and that is saving Australians something like $60 billion in debt interest,” he said.
Australia is expected to hit a record level of debt when the federal budget is revealed tonight.
Chalmers earlier spruiked the government’s “responsible economic management” for limiting gross debt to $940 billion in 2024-25.
While that’s a record for the Commonwealth and up from the $906.9 billion figure in 2023-24, it’s $177 billion lower than it was projected to be in a fiscal update before the last election in 2022.
Australia’s federal debt is still fairly low compared to the rest of the world, at just over a third of the size of the economy.
In the United Kingdom, government debt is almost as large as the gross domestic product (GDP), while the United States has surpassed 120 per cent.
But Australia’s debt is expected to grow as public spending increases and a temporary boost to revenue fades, peaking at 37 per cent of GDP.
— With additional reporting from the Australian Associated Press
