In an effort to address the “perfect storm” that is contributing to the ever-increasing expense of living, the Labor party is refusing to rule out the possibility of additional cash handouts.
This year, the Internal Revenue Service will provide a one-time tax credit of $420 to millions of individuals earning a low or moderate-income.
This is in addition to the current tax credit of up to $1080, which is available to workers whose annual income is less than $126,000.
The offsets were measures that were included in the final budget that was passed by the previous Coalition government. At the time, the then-Treasurer Josh Frydenberg promoted the offsets as proportionate steps to tackle rising expenses.
Now, the newly elected government has stated that they will do whatever it takes to bring prices down.
Tony Burke, the minister of employment and workplace relations, refused to answer a direct question about whether or not the Labor party will bring back cash transfers to address rising costs of living.
“We’re not ruling anything in or out effectively at the moment,” he told ABC Radio on Monday morning.
“It’s been a decade of no energy policy (under the former government) that has effectively led us to a situation where we’ve ended up with this perfect storm.
“Some of the issues are international, but our capacity to be able to deal with those international issues is very much domestic, so there won’t be a quick knee-jerk response.”
According to Burke, the $420 payments received support from both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party when they were first proposed in the budget for March.
However, he noted that the administration of Labor was not “putting anything more on the table at the moment.”
In order to combat the ever-increasing expense of living, Labor focused a significant portion of its campaign on raising wage levels.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) published numbers on pay growth just days before voters went to the polls that indicated it was at 2.4%.
Nevertheless, that is a very small percentage of the overall inflation rate, which was estimated to be 5.1% in April.
Because of this, the Reserve Bank of Australia decided to raise the cash rate by 25 basis points, taking it from a historic low of 0.1 percent to a new high.