Sky News Live With Margot: Leadership Decisions Should Be Agonising - The Federal Budget 2023

Leadership Decisions Should Be Agonising: The Federal Budget 2023

In leadership decision-making, we need to force-rank priorities, make imperfect choices and get comfortable with compromises in pursuit of the higher, long-term goal.  It’s difficult, and if you’re not finding it agonizing, you’re not leading (you’re fiddling at the margins).  

Today on Sky News I highlighted the leadership choices for the Government in delivering the Budget: strangling inflation or helping people with the cost-of-living crisis or staying popular.

Seems like Treasurer Jim Chalmers chose staying popular. He’s decided against reducing government spending or increasing taxes. He’s increased spending and the problem is, this could have the impact of actually worsening the crisis.  It’s caused by inflation, which is at a 30-year high.  And more government spending means more money in the system which drives up demand, causing inflation.  So, it’s likely the RBA is going to need to continue raising rates to tame inflation, causing more difficulty for borrowers who can least afford it.  If we don’t get inflation under control, energy prices will continue to rise and food security will become more of a problem (see the UK where vegetables have increased in price by 55% over the past year). The cost of living problems will worsen.

Leadership decisions are hard.  The right choice for Australians is to take our medicine to cure the illness of inflation today so that we don’t face even worse conditions tomorrow.  It may have cost the Government some popularity, but with a federal election two years away this was the time to prioritise the hard decision over the popular one.