The 2024-25 State Budget manages to send lutruwita/Tasmania into substantial further debt without addressing the major challenges facing the state and its people.
This is a classic Liberal budget, more of the same we’ve seen for many years. It has no vision and no clear pathway to a kinder, fairer, healthier, and more sustainable lutruwita/Tasmania. And it has its priorities all wrong.
The budget includes hundreds of millions of dollars to fund a stadium, tens of millions of dollars in tax cuts for property investors, and significant grants for property developers. It refuses to make big corporations pay their fair share. Much of this is paid for through further cuts to public services, including a $450 million so-called ‘efficiency dividend’ – including $135 million of cuts in health.
There are serious challenges facing lutruwita/Tasmania – the worsening problems in the health system, the housing affordability crisis, and terrible education outcomes. This budget tinkers at the edges, but does nothing to bring meaningful long-term improvements.
How can this government look at the housing crisis and think it’s OK to set a new target that has even more Tasmanians waiting for public housing? How is it appropriate to maintain dangerous ambulance response times or worsening ED wait times? How can they accept the high number of children at Ashley Youth Detention Centre as an ongoing situation?
Other than the huge expenditure risk they’re taking building a billion-dollar stadium, the Liberals are refusing to do more than deliver the status quo. It’s the Liberals’ last decade of the same budget decisions that has delivered the serious health crisis, rapidly growing homelessness, and an education system that’s not delivering.
There are many big problems facing lutruwita/Tasmania, and they won’t be solved overnight. However, there are things the Liberals can do to turn things in the right direction. It’s time to ditch the stadium, to make big corporations pay their fair share, and to invest in the services our state needs to become a kinder, fairer, healthier, and more sustainable place.
