Unless you’re some sort of super nerd who watched the budget speech yourself because you didn’t have any other plans and clearly don’t value your time, we did the hard work for you and subjected ourselves to the joy that was watching Treasurer Scott Morrison very proudly rattle off a bunch of figures and slogans.
JOBS AND GROWTH
As ScoMo made very clear (both by repeating it a lot in the speech and straight up telling reporters afterwards) this budget focuses primarily on jobs and growth, which the Government is hoping to achieve by increasing tax concessions for small and medium businesses while at the same time angling at taxing superwealthy multinationals who have so far been avoiding paying tax in Australia.
The Government is planning on redefining what constitutes small business by increasing the turnover threshold from $2 million up to $10 million, which will reduce the tax bracket a lot of formerly medium sized businesses were in. That threshold will also continue to rise up until 2023.
The income tax bracket that tops out at $80,000 will be shifted up to $87,000, and folks earning under $37,000 will get an up-to-$500 rebate on tax payed on super. If you’re in the middle of those two brackets then you won’t be seeing any change, good or bad.
TAX AVOIDANCE
A lot of the money that’s going to be spent in the budget is going to come from cracking down on multinationals who take their earnings overseas without paying tax on them in Australia, which will involve a 1000 ATO guys working solely on big biz tax avoidance and a so-called ‘Google tax’ that will tax earnings taken out of the country.
YOUTH UNEMPLOYMENT
The budget outlines plans to try and fix youth unemployment by giving job seekers skills training and paying businesses to take on job seekers in new internships, which will be about 15 – 25 hours a week and pay an additional $200 a fortnight on top of the New Start allowance, which doesn’t seem like a particularly great amount of cash.
INNOVATION
A strong element of the budget is making changes to help Australia adjust from its former mining driven economy to a new ‘innovation’ economy, which seems to mostly consist of giving cash and tax concessions to start-ups and funding a cybersecurity industry in the country.
TOBACCO
Smokers will be hit right in the durry pouch with a 12.5% annual increase in tobacco exercise over the next 20 years which should be make your darts a fair bit more exxy.
If you want to watch something a lot less dry than the budget itself, wrap your peepers around Morrison copping a grilling over the budget by Leigh Sales:
Treasurer Scott Morrison fronts 730 Report to answer questions on #Budget2016 https://t.co/WK4m3AKVVZ
— ABC News (@abcnews) May 3, 2016
Source: The Guardian.
Photo: Twitter.
