Robert Kennedy said about GDP.

Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product – if we judge the United States of America by that – that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. 

It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. 

It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman’s rifle and Speck’s knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. 

Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. 

It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. 

And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.

If this is true here at home, so it is true elsewhere in world. 

The budget released today, falls short in measuring and promoting all those things that Bobby Kennedy espoused so long back.

So we fret about petrol price and rob Peter to pay Paul to provide temporary succour for rising fuel prices and yet there is no investment in the budget to promote and encourage the manufacture of electric cars.

We talk about tax offsets, one of payments for those on lower income brackets but the extent of our ambition is lower taxes and trickle down economics doing the rest of the trick.

We are assailed by recurring floods and yet there is no substantial discussion in the budget about climate change and the threat it presents to our way of life and to our economy.

Our prosperity is still predicated on higher demand of coal and iron ore whilst we pay lip service to new industries of the future.

We fret about the growing divide between the rich and the poor, the have and the have nots but the budget does not talk at length of those who continue to struggle to just survive.

The older generation suffered a lot through Covid in aged care homes from lack of care and despite a Royal Commission the budget allows precious little to the aged care sector or structural reform of the sector to better outcomes.

We aspire to get unemployment to 3.75% but fail to examine the explosion in jobs like uber, delivery drivers and the like that offer very little of the work place protections we enjoy in this lucky country.

We want to reduce unemployment but we have no strategy in the budget of how we will deal with how AI and automation can cause mass scale disruption in employment in coming years.

Robert Kennedy would not probably be very inspired about this budget.