Overseas Development Assistance (ODA) is budgeted at 0.6% of total government expenditure. We are disappointed to see continuing decline of ODA as a percentage of total government expenditure.

In recognition of the scale of the economic impact of COVID-19 and the indirect impact of the pandemic on child health and wellbeing in the region, we welcome investment of an additional $304.7 million in the Pacific and Timor-Leste to address the social and economic costs of COVID-19 in the region. We welcome investment in regional vaccine procurement and health security.

Positive aged care Budget measures are a test for social planning. Older citizens in need of care and their families will rightly claim that the budget measure to provide an extra $1.6 billion for the delivery of a further 23,000 home care packages is long overdue.

Local government also plays a crucial role in the development of the support services that enable ageing in place - and the additional funding announced in the Budget for local government community infrastructure will also be welcomed by those concerned with healthy and positive ageing policy and programs.

We must make the most of these opportunities to get the prevention strategies and health care balance right at the local level.

Life conditions are known to have profound impacts upon mental health and wellbeing.  Reported cuts to homelessness services and an absence of stimulus investment in social housing will likely undermine mental health and well-being - especially for those with existing vulnerabilities. Increased levels of unemployment, homelessness and financial adversity are known correlates of suicidal ideation and attempts.

JobMaker is a nice idea, particularly considering the costs paid by the young in the Covid recession – but is it enough? Whether $200/week for under-30s, or $100/week for 30-35s, is enough to spur hiring of young people is an empirical question to be answered in the coming months.

Several items get a tick from me – including bringing forward personal income tax cuts for low/medium income individuals, local infrastructure project funding (though the government needs to make sure to avoid boondoggle projects that merely serve as a catalyst for more rent-seeking by big construction companies), asset write-offs and loss carrybacks for businesses – (though I would have liked to see revenue-contingent loan programs as part of the package of support for business investment), social housing (though again the government must make sure to avoid boondoggles), the YourSuper tool to compare fees and returns of superannuation packages (though I would have liked to see the initiation of an option to save independently for retirement in a tax-preferred way), and increased support for mental health.

The biggest omission in my view was in the area of childcare.  Frydenberg talked a lot about helping women through the recovery but this is a huge oversight that will directly impact women’s ability to participate in the economy as they otherwise could, and may wish to.  In addition, the support for aged care seemed a bit underbaked, given all we’ve learned during Covid about the welfare returns available from making progress in that sector.

Overall I’d give this budget a grade of B, based on Frydenberg’s announcement.  Quite good; not really great.

Young people with mental illness are significantly less likely than their peers without mental illness to complete high school or further education and make a transition to the work force. Yet evidence from trials conducted at Orygen in Melbourne and overseas shows that with a specific form of help called Individual Placement and Support young people with mental illness can succeed in these areas. So the $45.7 million announced in the budget to extend and expand the Government’s Individual Placement and Support trial is a welcome move. This will double the capacity of the current program and make this evidence based vocational recovery support available to thousands more young people who need it. This is great for them, their families and communities.

Moving forward it will be important for the government to  invest in the development of an Individual Placement and Support workforce, implementation research to ensure that scaling up of this program maintains quality outcomes and to make this intervention available to more people with mental illness, such as those over the age of 25, who want to work but just need a little more support to do so.

The 2020-21 Federal Budget is a significant response to the crisis facing Australia’s scientists as a result of the pandemic.   
 
The additional $1 billion injection of funding in 2021 to support research at Australia’s universities hit badly by the pandemic is welcomed by the Academy. 
 
An increase in 505 jobs in a cross section of government science agencies will also assist in research recovery.  
 
The Academy applauds the strategic decision to back proven STEM school education programs by injecting $27.3 million over five years as an investment in the future workforce. This includes $9.6 million over five years to support programs delivered by the Australian Academy of Science. 
 
The Academy also welcomes:  

• $10 million to extend the Women in STEM and Entrepreneurship Program (WISE) and the extension of the term of the Women in STEM Ambassador, both of which will assist in the continuation of the implementation of the Academy’s Women in STEM Decadal Plan. 
• Recognition of the impact of the pandemic on Australia’s national science agencies, in particular CSIRO, BOM and ANSTO, with $965.6 million in additional funding over four years. 
• Continued delivery of the 2020 Research Infrastructure Investment Plan with $36.3 million to upgrade the Sea Simulator at AIMS; $8.3 million for new synthetic biology infrastructure; and $7.6 million to upgrade the Australian Community Climate and Earth System Simulator (ACCESS) as recommended by the Academy’s Climate Science Capability Review in 2017. 
• $1.5 billion for the manufacturing strategy announced by the Prime Minister last Thursday focussed on bringing business research collaboration at scale. 
• $41.6 million for a Strategic University Reform Fund. 
• A further $36.6 million provided over two years from 2020-21 to maintain the timeliness of environmental assessments and undertake further reforms under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (EPBC Act). 

 Additional refinements to the R&D tax incentive are positive, however, given that non-mining investment will fall by over 14.5% in 2021, more is needed to transform Australia’s business investment in R&D.

The Academy of Technology and Engineering (ATSE) overall welcomes the Federal government’s investment in the higher education sector, Women in STEM, and low emissions and clean energy economy.
 
The $1bn investment into the higher education sector is critical in building a STEM-skilled workforce, which has been significantly impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.
 
Australia’s knowledge creation and translation sector has been impacted with the loss of jobs, changes to the international student population, and barriers to completing research.
 
This investment will go a long way to rebuilding Australia’s research sector with a range of measures to build the STEM workforce and increase greater industry-research collaboration, and we look forward to hearing how this investment will be applied.
 
The new $5.8m allocation to scope a translational research fund is also a step in the right direction.
 
We also welcome the government’s investment to increase women’s participation in STEM with a $240m package for ongoing support to programs to build better gender balance in the STEM sector.
 
Finally, it’s good to see investments being made toward the important transition to a clean energy and low emissions economy, including a much needed boost to Australia’s renewable energy agency.

Debt and Deficit disaster? Forget the ‘Back in Black’ surplus boast of yesteryear. We are staying in deficit which will be $231.7 billion this year but we need it to help withstand the economic impact of COVID19 (see Coronanomics: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-04-01/coronanomics-things-learnt-about-how-coronavirus-economy/12106552) Net debt is expected to peak at $966 billion by June 2024 or 44 per cent of GDP. Luckily interest rates are low. 

It’s about jobs jobs jobs. The Government hopes to create 950,000 jobs over the next four years, which means hopefully the unemployment rate will peak at 8 per cent not 10 per cent as was once feared.  

To help employers create jobs, especially for young people, in the spirit of job keeper and job maker, the government is providing wage subsidies for apprenticeships, $200 for a worker aged 16 to 29, and $100 if aged between 30 and 35.  

It’s about investment to help business. But what looks like a $26 billion investment allowance, is actually immediate expensing (allowing businesses to write off expenses speeding up depreciation) and a loss carry back. But still every bit helps in a pandemic as severe as this one.  

It’s about tax. The Government has announced tax relief across the board by bringing tax cuts forward and making the low and middle income tax offset permanent. And assuming the tax saved is spent by households, then that’s added stimulus. 

It’s about manufacturing. Yes Australia is now a place that makes things again with a manufacturing statement providing assistance to key sectors and reversing an earlier decision to tighten up Research and Development (R & D). 

It’s about infrastructure. The government has some good old fashioned ‘shovel ready’ projects to help stimulate the economy when the private sector is shy about investment. Some Keynesian pump priming is needed in the biggest economic crisis since The Great Depression. 

The bottom line – the Budget is cash splash throwing all the levers to get us out of recession and predicts we should back to normal within 4 years. But of course, this also assumes we find a vaccine to COVD19 that can be easily rolled out globally. That will ultimately decide if the Budget numbers stand or fall. Let’s hope they do and we can reskill rebuild Australia and re-employ Australians.

In the context of a big spending budget, it is disappointing to see no initiatives to address the exposure of infants and children to high levels of distress and disturbance in the context of child abuse and neglect.

This requires investment in high quality interdisciplinary intensive family support services, vulnerable parent/infant programs, mental health expertise in early childhood centres - in services that incorporate highly skilled practitioners who are able to deliver trauma- based therapeutic services.

And yet what we have is a massive increase in funding to private psychologists, who rarely work with the most vulnerable and challenging families.

There is nothing in the budget to address child abuse or neglect, a most serious public health issue and one potentially worsened in the context of the covid pandemic.

COVID-19 restrictions have meant high levels of stress  and isolation and for many people, with a range of mental health conditions, reduced access to care.
 
In many cases, group sessions have been cancelled, and face-to-face programmes replaced with video conferences or telehealth sessions. For many people, such significant changes to their regular treatment regime can be very unsettling, and can significantly impact their recovery. We know that people are lapsing, and relapsing.

The Budget announcement of a doubling of Medicare funded psychological therapy services is very welcome and a hugely important step to assist people, particularly young people severely affected by COVID,  access the help they need to work toward their recovery.

Despite the adverse impacts of the COVID19 pandemic on mental health and wellbeing, and the predicted effects in 2021 and 2022 on suicidal behaviour, in its 2020 Budget the Morrison Government has largely postponed any significant new response – pending the release later this year of the final report of the Productivity Commission on Mental Health and a separate report to the PM on reducing suicide. This is unfortunate as there is an urgent need to invest in 2020 to develop the range of new services that are required to prevent further harm. Only Victoria will be the beneficiary of the range of new service hubs that would have been a benefit to all Australians during this crisis.
 
The only major health care change announced tonight was to increase the maximum number of rebated sessions for psychological services available under Medicare from 10 to 20 per person, each year. Although strongly advocated for by those professionals who are providing these services, and some of those people who have been able to access this care, more sophisticated analyses indicate that this is the least good spend of new money in mental health. These services are already associated with large out-of-pocket expenses and are least available to those living in poorer, outer urban, regional or rural locations. Increasing the number of services to any one person may actually result in less services being available to others who will then endure longer waiting times before receiving any services. It is not the best mechanism for delivering multi-disciplinary team-based care to those with more complex mental disorders. It is not likely to result in any significant increase in better access to high quality care.
 
The emphasis the Government has placed in this budget on supporting employment of young Australians is critical to their mental health. Given the massive disruption to youth employment, education and skills development due to COVID19, it is critical to continue to invest preferentially in the future of young people. While investments in the Vocational Education and Training Sector are very welcome, the changes to the funding of Higher Education appear to move in the opposite and most unfavourable direction. To support the future ‘mental wealth’ of all young Australians, Governments will need to invest heavily in all these sectors for at least the next five years.

The budget is a missed opportunity to reset Australia’s failed climate policy, in the light of China’s commitment to a net zero target and the likely election of a Biden Administration committed to big reductions in US emissions. Instead, we got a string of backward looking gestures including subsidies for an obsolete coal-fired power station, another go at the failed technology of carbon capture and storage and a continued push for gas.

Despite having no domestic vehicle manufacturing industry to worry about, and a problematic dependence on imported petroleum the government has done nothing for electric vehicles and ignored the problem of fuel efficiency yet again.

The transport infrastructure funding announced in tonight’s budget does not recognise the changing landscape of urban and regional transport in a post-COVID world. The business cases for such projects would have been based on assumptions of high population growth making them risky and will likely fail to deliver the anticipated benefits in the wake of the COVID-19 recession.

The sharp slowdown in population growth along with work place changes (e.g. changing habits like working from home) are likely to make most of these projects less appealing economically. In July, the federal government revealed it expected annual population growth to fall to 0.6 per cent this financial year which would be slowest population growth rate since 1916-17. A large proportion of people are likely to continue to work from home reducing the need for large increases in infrastructure supply. It is crucial that the business cases for these projects be re-assessed by taking a holistic view of previous massive mega infrastructure commitments and the lessons being learned from the pandemic.

Instead, the infrastructure spending needed to target projects that would protect our cities and regional centres against future threats. For example, the pandemic has shown us just how fragile public transport can be particularly as people avoid crowded spaces.

The infrastructure spending could have targeted more investments in smaller projects across all cities to improve public transport operations as well as road and rail infrastructure maintenance including station upgrades and acceleration of public transport technology solutions to reduce crowding and revive passenger confidence in public transport.

There is also strong appetite in all Australian cities for investments that target improvements in walking, cycling and micro-mobility infrastructure. Such investments have smaller outlays and higher return on investment.

The infrastructure investments fall short of expectations and are not radically different from the 2019/2020 infrastructure spending, given the Reserve Bank has estimated that states and territories will need to spend up to $40 billion on their own public works.

Also, the budget failed to address the social housing issues that have manifested themselves during the pandemic which would have provided a substantial economic boost as they require smaller scale contractors who would have been more hit by the recession than the larger contractors. Such projects are needed in all cities and would have probably received support or co-investment from states and territories

In listening to the Budget 2020 delivery, I awaited a statement that commenced:
 
Mr Speaker, at a time when our budget includes so much commentary on rebuilding a nation for the long term, I must acknowledge the importance of investing in the generations who will come after this COVID-crisis era through substantial investment across our Education sectors. I have already outlined the investment in short courses for Teacher Education and have outlined in the short term how we will create jobs for our young people who lost employment opportunities before they commenced. I have stressed an emphasis on skills training and the importance of education and will now outline the evidence of the Morrison Government’s commitment to each.
 
That commencement of a statement never came, nor did the commitment across Education and Childcare sectors. We did not hear about an injection to our Teachers who have been reclassified as frontline and highly adaptable and skilled professionals during the COVID crisis, nor to our schools who have kept our young people safe through the whole gamut of traumas that Josh Frydenburg outlined as the dramatic launch of his Budget oration.

We did not hear about an uplift in Technical and Adult Education (TAFE), nor how we might create a range of alternate pathways to provide our young people with access to schooling for longer during a most unusual period. We are yet to hear about how the Government will invest in the Educational priorities currently being flagged by the Federal Government, such as increased Literacy and Numeracy outcomes, Indigenous Cultural Competence for Every Teacher and School and the inclusion of Trauma Informed Approaches in Teaching.

We are yet to hear about how we will create more equitable Educational experiences for those less able or those who are further afield in Regional, Remote and Indigenous Communities.

And, we wait with bated breath to see the Job Ready Graduates package move across the Senate floor how that will also impact on the generations who will experience the compound debts of the budget packages throughout their lifetimes.
 
From an Educational listening post, this budget was deafeningly silent regardless of the motherhood claims that it would be a record investment. If it was important, it would have had more attention and more transparent detail.