I've been busy and found it difficult to assign time to assessing the budget. Clearly the Labor Party has inherited a fabulously prosperous economy - that the terms of trade is due to increase by so much over the next year is astounding and should dominate our impressions of where the Australian economy is going.

The bugdet response has been to award miserly tax cuts to lower income groups and to defer them for higher income groups and to run a massive budget surplus. Much of the surplus is to end up in investment funds to be spent on infrastructure, health and education. Read more »