6/27/2023 0 Comments Dont say no![]() “You know, these are reasonably large budgets. ![]() “It won’t always be the answer, and perhaps after the end of a couple of budgets of reprioritising you get to point where there isn’t much room to move, but I think it’s an important part of the discipline. “The other thing, though, and we’ve done this in two budgets, is asking ministers to go and have a look at the money they’ve already got and see what is possible. “In the end I guess it was not everything they wanted, probably more than I wanted, but we landed somewhere in the middle. One of the important budget rules she is enforcing is that new spending generally has to be offset from within the portfolio. Gallagher says in the run-up to this year’s budget she spent a lot of time with ministers identifying measures in each portfolio where funding was running out to determine how they should continue. “You’ve got to balance out things you can do, things you want to do, things you can’t do against the resources available to you.”įinance Minister Katy Gallagher and Treasurer Dr Jim Chalmers ahead of the budget. I don’t know whether I got it from all my years in the ACT where I guess I got insight from being a junior minister, to being the chief minister and treasurer about how budgets are put together, even though it’s a lot smaller. “I set pretty high expectations of our accountability through the budget to the people of Australia. “The first thing that guides me is I believe very deeply that we should be using public money in the best way possible, efficiently, delivering outcomes. say the inflation challenge wasn’t what it was, there is no shortage of areas or calls on the budget to do some more lifting. “I don’t know if it is underestimated how much pressure was on us to spend in this budget,” Gallagher says. She maintains the government can stick to fiscal discipline and budget repair amid left-wing demands, including from the Labor base, for higher welfare, health and education spending. In the run-up to this week’s budget, Gallagher has spoken repeatedly about how the Labor government has identified almost $40 billion in savings since coming to power. “I’ve never worked with a better person,” Chalmers said. If Anthony Albanese and Jim Chalmers are the frontmen for Labor’s efforts to recapture the mantle as better economic managers, Gallagher has emerged as a key behind-the-scenes figure in the task of whipping the budget into shape.Ĭhalmers was effusive in his praise of Gallagher on Wednesday, describing her as an “extraordinary friend and colleague, strong and selfless, and so valued and indispensable in our team”. She became the ACT’s chief minister in 2011, serving in the role for 3½ years before switching to federal politics as one of the territory’s two senators. When Labor came to power last year, there was no shortage of new ministers who had been ex-ministers, but Gallagher was the only one sitting around the cabinet table who had been a former head of government. When she did return to work, Gallagher joined the Community and Public Sector Union as an organiser before being elected to the ACT Legislative Assembly in 2001. She was 13 weeks’ pregnant at the time and was working for a disability support and advocacy organisation. Gallagher found herself relying on welfare after her fiance, Brett Seaman, was killed in a cycling accident in 1997. You are certainly shaped by that experience.” “I’ve seen what it is like to have something happen when, bam, you go from being a two-income couple waiting for the birth of your baby and all of a sudden you’re on the widow’s pension, renting a house in the outer suburbs of Canberra waiting for a baby to be born with no job. “When you read reports about people losing 100 bucks when their kid turns eight, you can remember what it was like living on a payment. “I think everyone brings to the table their experience,” Gallagher tells The Australian Financial Review on Wednesday amid the whirlwind of the post-budget sales job. While Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, famously raised by a single mother on a disability pension, had made it a personal crusade, it was also an issue close to Gallagher’s heartįinance Minister Katy Gallagher with Westpac’s Chris de Bruin at Wednesday’s post-budget National Press Club address. If any budget measure had more meaning than most to Finance Minister Katy Gallagher, it was lifting the cut-off age for single parent payments.
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