The New South Wales State Budget has landed with all the fanfare of a Temu package tossed onto the front porch by a harried delivery driver.
It’s not that Treasurer Daniel Mookhey hasn’t been working to sell the Minns Government’s last big economic announcement before the March 2027 State Election.
All but a handful of spending measures were unveiled in the week before and the media reception has been muted, at best.
That’s how it goes for governments these days. You’d have to go back to the Howard and Rudd eras to find examples of Budgets that prompted a positive bump in polling numbers. The polling isn’t yet in but it would be stunning if this one broke the mould.
Treasurer Mookhey’s fourth Budget projected the image of a government going about the business of fiscal repair. It predicts an operating deficit of approximately $2.3 billion before returning to surplus in 2027–28.
The Budget delivers significant new spending in health, education and transport, domestic and family violence services and hands out modest offsets to household travel expenses.
It also contains just under a billion dollars in unannounced spending that we’ll hear more about as the election draws closer. Much of it will be allocated to infrastructure in marginal seats on Sydney’s growing fringes, where the threat of One Nation is greatest.
Mookhey says NSW is experiencing “booming investment by private investment in renewable energy and AI-related infrastructure”. His Budget papers predict the State’s economy is slowing…without saying by how much.
To be fair, there’s not a lot a State can do to supercharge its own growth when the national GDP was + 0.2 percent in the last quarter with annual growth crawling at +1.3 percent.
But if there’s a silver bullet for suddenly reviving productivity, you won’t find it in the NSW Budget papers.
Craig Regan, Senior Account Director
Image: AI generated
