Ben’s Blog

Wow, I just read the transcript of Wayne Swan’s speech. Scary stuff. Noun/adjective combinations perfectly pitched to give you the heebie-jeebies, which might be stilled a little – but only a little – by the Churchillian stuff about opportunities rising out of challenges, Australians being too strong, resilient and united to be overwhelmed, and all that…

Recession. Challenging. Severity. Brutal. Downturn. Uncompromising. Ferocity. Adversity.

And the change in budget position from a $21.7 billion surplus in 2008/09 to a projected deficit of $57.6 billion this year gives a pretty good indication of what the government intends to do in response to this ferocious, uncompromising and brutal downturn. And let’s hope the Government’s spending/investment/stimulus plans work out.

Because I’m no economist, but if the Treasury forecasts turn out to be accurate:

• real GDP returns to modest positive growth in 2009/10, and then 4+1/2% growth in the following years
• unemployment peaks next year at 8+1/2% and falls back to last year’s levels over the following two years

then I’d say we’ve been extraordinarily lucky.

Now, as for the aid budget…

The headline figures are that in 2009/10:

Australian Official Development Assistance is budgeted to increase to $3.82 billion (a 5.6% real increase on last year’s $3.66 billion) which, given the circumstances, and the fact that hundreds of millions of $$$ of Iraq debt cancellation are no longer included, is actually pretty good.

Australian ODA will reach 0.34% of Gross National Income (up from 0.33% last year, though falling short of last year’s forward estimates which aimed to reach 0.35% this year, and still well short of the OECD average country effort of 0.47% GNI and leaving us 15th most generous of 22 rich country donors).

More detailed discussion of what’s behind the headlines shortly…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 13th, 2009 at 4:49 am and is filed under Aid, Back-Talk, Development, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.