Housing activists criticised the first Labor budget for failing to act on housing shortages affecting hundreds of thousands of people across New South Wales. Jim McIlroy reports.
NSW State Budget
The NSW Minister for Local Government Wendy Tuckerman has confirmed the government will pay for the cost of council demergers. Brian Halstead reports.
UnionsNSW say the state government's decision to abandon its public sector wage cap is an admission of wrongdoing. Jim McIlroy reports.
The NSW budget claims to be about job creation but entrenches cuts to public sector workers' pay while handing windfalls to private corporations, writes Jim McIlroy.
Jim McIlroy reports that nurses, teachers and other public sector workers protested the NSW Coalition government's effective wage cut imposed on COVID-19 frontline workers.
"The NSW Coalition government's 2017 budget might be better described as the ‘biggest con-job in the Western world’," Susan Price, Socialist Alliance candidate for Ashfield in the upcoming Inner West Council elections, said on June 21. She was responding to state Treasurer Dominic Perrottet's declaration that his inaugural budget was "the envy of the Western world".
"The NSW state budget brought down by the Mike Baird government on June 21, which was trumpeted by Treasurer Gladys Berejiklian as 'the strongest in the country,' is a scam, based on stamp duty from overpriced housing sales and the sell-off of the state's electricity assets," Peter Boyle, Socialist Alliance candidate for the seat of Sydney in the federal election, said on June 23.
"The NSW Coalition government's 2015 budget has a massive 'housing sales tax' windfall from stamp duty arising from the Sydney housing bubble," Susan Price, Socialist Alliance candidate in the recent NSW state elections, said on June 24.
The government expects to reap more than $30 billion in stamp duty in the next four years, but the budget papers note that the cyclical nature of the property market means that revenue source is "inherently volatile".