You may have missed it, but the Budget was announced on Tuesday night (29th March 2022). As this is an election year, the budget was moved forward and it took many people by surprise. This was more due to the fact that they forgot that it was happening as opposed to it’s content. It certainly made less headlines than Will Smith, and packed less of a punch too.
A brief summary of the main talking points are below. For those who need more details there is also a report on all that was announced in the budget.
To Download a copy of our Client Guide to all the announcements in the 2022-23 Budget please click here.
The main focus of the Budget was to seek to ease some of the concerns around consumer confidence and to boost it with several temporary measures, most notably:
From a Small Business perspective, there were some new policies that will directly benefit small businesses including:
– Until June 2024 for every $100 a small business invests in external training courses for their employees they will get a $120 tax deduction (Skills and Training Boost).
– Until June 2023 for every $100 a small business spends on new digitalising their business (for items such as cloud accounting, online security and eInvoicing software) they will get a $120 tax deduction up to $100,000/year (Technology Investment Boost).
One long standing policy that has been repeatedly extended is the instant asset depreciation program. This was not extended in the Budget and could end on 30 June 2023.
Overall, this Budget is designed to provide relief from cost of living pressures and minimise ‘losers’ from any policy decisions. Attention will now turn to next week’s Reserve Bank Board meeting to understand how this Budget may impact the Bank’s thinking around interest rates. Then the focus will be firmly on the timing of the federal election, when we will next hear from Treasury in its Pre-Election Fiscal Outlook.
1 Calculated using national average price of unleaded 95 petrol published on drive.com.au.