Welcome to the April/May 2025 Economic Bulletin. The Minister of Finance has made it clear Budget 2025 will bring further cuts to public investment. She has chopped the operating allowance almost in half, said most government departments will not receive any additional funding, and signalled that numerous government programmes are to be axed, totalling “billions of dollars” of cuts. The Minister argues this is necessary to reduce the nation’s public debt – which she suggests has reached a dangerously high level. In our feature article, we examine why this claim doesn’t stack up.
In our regular updates, we cover the quarterly data releases on wages, employment, social welfare, and consumer inflation. We also provide the regular monthly analysis of migration, performance indexes, consumer and business confidence, and the government accounts.