Budget sweetness sours when you do some sums

Excuse me if I seem skittish this morning. I'm deliriously excited because the federal budget is going to make life so much easier. Can barely contain myself.

The energy rebate will loosen the financial shackles. Even an innumerate dunce like me can figure that out. Three hundred bucks off the quarterly bills over the year. That's $75 each bill. Divide that by three and it's a saving of $25 a month. Divide that by four and that's a weekly saving of $6.25. Oh, how we'll party with that extra cash. Enough for a sausage roll and a bottle of water - if we shop around.

Satire often nails it best, as The Betoota Advocate did yesterday with its headline: "Government secures Australia's future by handing $300 directly to the power companies on behalf of households".

But wait, there's more.

From July 1, we all get a tax cut - if you pay tax, that is. Someone earning, say, $70,000 a year will get an annual tax cut of $1429. Divide it by 52, and that's about $27.50 a week. Imagine the feast that will buy at the supermarket. A loaf of bread, some milk, a block of cheese, a lettuce and a tomato if they're in season.

Winning!

Pensioners and those on Jobseeker and other income support payments might qualify for the 10 per cent increase in rent assistance - if they're renting. If they own their own home, bad luck. As St Vincent de Paul Society president Paul Gaetani put it yesterday: "Little extra funding has been allocated to helping the many people relying on income support payments or very low wages. They continue to face a national rental crisis as well as the rising cost of essentials, especially food."

Gaetani threw in some chilling statistics. On any given day, he said, more than half a million households struggle to put food on the table. In NSW in the past year, there's been a 125 per cent increase in people relying on Vinnies' food vans.

Of course, it's not just the battlers battling. In this country, the fight against inflation has fallen on the shoulders of everyday mortgage holders, whose disposable incomes have been gutted by the steepest interest rate rises in decades. No tax cut or power rebate is going to get them close to where they were when inflation started galloping away in the dying days of the Morrison government.

We're not all "doing it tough", though.

The government is rolling in loot. High prices for coal, iron ore and gas have filled the coffers. So, too, persistently low unemployment, which has meant an income tax revenue windfall - and a rare year-on-year budget surplus, which we'll hear about repeatedly all the way to the next election. Seems it's leaning while we all do the lifting.

By now, you've sensed I've put away the party hat and streamers. The sugar hit has worn off and the headache has returned. Budget season has wrapped for the government but not for most households. For them budget time comes around every week and there's little sign it will get any easier.

HAVE YOUR SAY: Will the federal budget affect how you vote in the next election? Will the tax cuts and power rebate make much of a material difference in your household? Could more have been done to help the most vulnerable in our society? Email us: echidna@theechidna.com.au

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IN CASE YOU MISSED IT:

- A new regulator will check the emissions of vehicles sold in Australia from next year and ensure automakers are complying with Australia's fuel-efficiency standard. Details of the agency were revealed in the federal budget on Tuesday night, along with plans for a public education campaign about the laws and a commitment to install vehicle-charging stations at car dealerships.

- More people escaping domestic violence could be turned away from legal services during an epidemic of gender-based violence, a peak body warns. Though the federal budget committed some funding to community legal centres, legal assistance programs dedicated to women affected by gender-based violence has been omitted, Women's Legal Services Australia found.

- Angry farmers have walked out of a budget breakfast enraged by the live sheep export ban, with the trade to end by May 2028. More than a dozen farmers and leaders of several peak agricultural groups wearing "keep the sheep" T-shirts, walked out of the budget wrap up, when the Agriculture Minister Murray Watt started talking about the ban.

THEY SAID IT: "As long as poverty, injustice and gross inequality persist in our world, none of us can truly rest." - Nelson Mandela

YOU SAID IT: Israeli militants don't help their country's cause by attacking convoys delivering humanitarian aid to Gaza.

"Gaza has been blockaded for 17 years," writes Phil. "It has led to the economic, health, education and cultural crushing of the people of Gaza. Hamas is the consequence of this action. Now Israel is punishing Gaza by killing 50 civilians for every Israeli that died. It is unconscionable."

Ian writes: "Starving a population to death is no worse than bombing them into oblivion. Starvation and bombardment have been time-honoured techniques for subduing walled cities or castles since at least medieval times. More recently, the British attempted to starve the Germans into surrender with their naval blockade during World War I and to bomb them into submission during World War II. Both strategies are abhorrent. Their applications in the current Gaza conflict additionally carry the stench of genocide or ethnic cleansing about them."

"The deliberate delaying of aid trucks; the murder of aid personnel; the destruction of aid packages whilst the Israeli state looks away is an indication of how barbaric the Israeli democracy has become," writes Bernard. "So no, this state starvation tactic is not legitimate."

Peter from Canberra writes: "Remember 1967? Israel was the brave underdog, fighting off multiple threats while much of the West cheered. Now, Israel has squandered all that goodwill, rightly condemned for its excesses and atrocities. We can see the need for them both to co-exist: why can't Israelis and Palestinians?"

"So, what to do?" asks Murray. "Rule number one is never negotiate with terrorists. Yet humanity urges us to provide aid to the people in Gaza. We know full well that Hamas are using the Gazans as a screen and any aid provided to the Palestinian people will be aid to the terrorists. Giving aid and comfort to the enemy is called treason. There is a simple solution. Hamas must surrender. They will never do that, they are committed to destroying Israel. And so the people of Gaza suffer."

John writes: "I met a Palestinian refugee at a John Pilger book launch many years ago. She was a doctor living in what became Israel in 1948. She and her family were booted out of her home (and country) with no compensation. This opened my eyes that the Palestinians were thrown under the proverbial bus by the rest of the world with the way the modern state of Israel was created. Reading about the trashing of the food convoy by Israeli settlers with the Israeli military/police turning a blind eye says to me that the modern day Israel is no longer trying to hide its long-term treatment of Palestinians in the occupied territories."