Share your thoughts on the 2025/26 budget!

[Ru-bee]

The Australian Government dropped their Budget last night, and as expected, it contained some financial sweeteners to help people with cost of living but not a lot for mental health and suicide prevention.

The big ticket items were -

· Tax Cuts: A 1% tax cut for people on incomes between $18,201 and $45,000 will be implemented, increasing to 2% in 2027. They will also reduce all HECS/HELP debts by 20% as a one-of benefit.

· Energy bill relief: A one-off rebate of $150 for energy bills for all Australian households will be provided from July 2025.

· Better GP access –New Urgent Care Clinics will be opened to ease pressure on Emergency Rooms and incentive programs implemented to boost bulkbilling

· Access to medicines – The price of PBS-listed medicines will be reduced from $31 to $25 for those without concession cards and frozen at $7.70 for those with cards. A new treatment for major depression has also been listed on the PBS.

· Mental health support – Additional budget was provided for digital mental health services including QLife, as well as bushfire resilience activities in rural and regional Australia and a specialist support program for First Responders.

· Housing – A new ‘Help to Buy’ scheme will provide assistance to those on low incomes who are looking to purchase housing and $6m has been allocated to Housing and Homelessness organisations to develop new solutions.

· NDIS – Continuation of the Scheme with a large chunk of new funding to improve ‘fraud detection’.

· Autism – Over $40m has been dedicated to the implementation of the National Autism Strategy.

If you’d like to learn more about any of these, you can find the full Budget papers here Budget.gov.au | Budget 2025–26

What do you think?!

We’d love to hear what you think about this budget. Will any of these announcements make a big difference to your life? What is the most useful, and what opportunities have they missed.

Let us know your thoughts and we’ll include them in a SANE Community response that will distributed to key government and health sector partners (anonymously, of course!)

[chibam]

I haven't had a chance to completely read through the website yet, @Ru-bee , so I'll probably come back to this later, but for now:

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@Ru-bee wrote:

· Energy bill relief: A one-off rebate of $150 for energy bills for all Australian households will be provided from July 2025.

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Sounds like a band-aid solution to me. Supply and demand are immensely more relevant factors then small one-time handouts.

Until the government are able to offer cheap, adequate, continuous energy production, this problem will continue to weigh heavilly upon Australians.

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@Ru-bee wrote:

· Access to medicines – The price of PBS-listed medicines will be reduced from $31 to $25 for those without concession cards and frozen at $7.70 for those with cards. A new treatment for major depression has also been listed on the PBS.

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Cost reduction is all well and good, but honestly one of the best things the government can do is remove the legal restrictions to accessing medicines!

We've seen considderable improvements in this area over recent years, with online services able to offer instant perscriptions without a doctor appointment; and I think now you can even get a perscription directly from the pharmacist? Effectively making many 'perscription' medicines now over-the-counter ones? (Or maybe this scheme isn't in effect, but is being talked about?)

In any event we need more of these sorts of improvements to access to medicine. Make less medicines perscription-only medicines. Take the red-tape pressure off GPs by not requiring patients to book an appointment with them, just to get the necessary paperwork to be able to buy a medicine they already know they need.

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@Ru-bee wrote:

· Mental health support – Additional budget was provided for digital mental health services including QLife, as well as bushfire resilience activities in rural and regional Australia and a specialist support program for First Responders.

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I couldn't find this on the website? You'd think it would be under the "Health" heading, wouldn't you? Did I skip over it or something?

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@Ru-bee wrote:

· Housing – A new ‘Help to Buy’ scheme will provide assistance to those on low incomes who are looking to purchase housing and $6m has been allocated to Housing and Homelessness organisations to develop new solutions.

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Most importantly, the government is apparently showing interest in hiring new construction workers to actually build these homes!

Unfortunately, there's not much detail about where their gonna get these workers from; and, regrettably, it seems like their determined to put all these workers through an "apprentice program", rather then offering any direct routes to becoming a proper construction worker.

One would hope that they would be prioritizing the most long-term unemployed and impoverished Australians to get these jobs; but the website doesn't clarify this.

On that note, there wasn't much information in the sections I've read thus far about increasing employment, overall.

The government is running ads promising a massive increase in manufacturing jobs. We've heard that one before. Proof will be in the pudding.

But even if the government does follow through and actually create all these jobs, whose gonna get them?

[Bow]

None of this is really addressing the cost of living crisis for so many people. 
When will they do something decent to help those genuinely struggling with the cost of rent? I am fortunate that I do live with my mum and we split… well no she pays more than half, but my contribution to rent is such a high percentage and of my DSP each fortnight. 

and I know they are making changes to the PBS. But medication is still so expensive. I seen a story on the news last night about a lady that has been fighting cancer for 8yrs. One of her medications costs her something like $2,000 a month. BUT if she had a different type of cancer it would only cost $30. This is the case for so many people with education. Some of my meds are cheap and on the PBS. But others, cause I don’t have a certain diagnosis and it’s ’off label’ it’s so expensive. 

all the pollys need to take a pay cut…. They all get nice chunky pay rises while some of us get $3 extra a week. 

[MDT]

Where to start?

Anything power/energy related almost feels like a waste of energy (pun intended). Had we implemented renewable energy long ago we'd be laughing at the rest of the world with their concerns over power consumption. By now we could have had a comparative advantage in solar power battery development and production. We could've exported it to the world. We have ample sunlight and the capacity to develop the industry (innovation in other words). Just like the failure of the resources rent tax (Gillard, thanks LNP and Murdoch for stuffing that up btw) and the nationalisation of the mining industry (Whitlam, thanks LNP and Murdoch and Rinehart for stuffing that up too) we have to look at the epic failure when it comes renewable energy..... If we wanted to go nuclear then we should've done it back in the 80s... 

Anything medical related won't be enough. But the urgent care clinic model is a good idea in principle as it obviously takes strain off the system. Bring back bulk billing and make it illegal for doctors to charge such high rates.

I'm glad they have cut funding to dodgy consultants though - about 4 billion saved. GOOD. ABOUT TIME. 

I heard the election will be announced in the next day or so to deflect attention away from the LNP reply speech. Here's hoping that is true. 

Don't even get me started on AUKUS.....

[MDT]

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-03-27/albanese-expected-to-call-federal-election-this-morning/10510... 

[Happychick]

I like it. I didn’t think I’d get anything but if they increase bulk billing and cut the medicines to 25 dollars that will help me and if they reduce my hecs debt by 20 percent I’ll definitely vote for the albanese government I don’t trust Peter Dutton to do what he says he’ll do he’s a big fat liar

[AuntJobiska]

• Bulk billing incentives - a disaster. Only for short consults, so useless for mental health consults... Whoever has a serious mental illness consult in less than 20 minutes? And they've taken away the mental health care plan payment at the same time! Plus even at the tripling of the payment, a GP in the city would still be taking a paycut to bulk bill a short appointment! Because the base payment was so low. Plus, the extra that a practice gets if all patients are bulk billed goes to the practice owner, not the individual GP, and virtually mandates payroll tax (a tax increase aka paycut for GPs). 

This does absolutely nothing to help the part-time female GP who sees lots of complex patients with usually long appointments, whose take home pay after AHPRA fees etc is less than a childcare worker's! For a dozen years of hard yakka training and serious liability into the bargain...

It advantages the people in the bulk billing factories that push patients through every 6 minutes...

And as for the Urgent Care Centres... No no no! I want to see my GP when I need to see a GP urgently, not some random nurse practitioner (these urgent care centres are typically staffed by nurses not doctors - there's a supervising dr somewhere) who I've never seen before and certainly aren't going to tell my psych history to... Who cost 5x per appointment than a GP... Put the money into GP practices, so I can get into my GP the same day (like GP used to be), strengthen general practice, plus it makes GP much more interesting for the GP and keeps their skills up if they're also doing acute care work, if all they're ever doing is preventative care and mental health they risk deskilling...