19 July 2022, The Conversation: ‘Wellbeing’. It’s why Labor’s first budget will have more rigour than any before it. What if the most important thing in Jim Chalmers’ first budget is the thing his critics are writing off as a gimmick? Australia’s new treasurer has a lot on his plate. He has commissioned a complete review of the way the Reserve Bank works, he is drawing up a statement to parliament he says people will find “confronting” and he is preparing the second of two budgets in one year; in October, updating the Coalition’s budget in March. In what some see as a gimmick, it will be Australia’s first budget to benchmark its measures against their impact on the wellbeing of the Australian people: Australia’s first “wellbeing budget”. Read more: Beyond GDP: Chalmers’ historic moment to build wellbeing. When Chalmers proposed the idea in opposition, the treasurer at the time, Josh Frydenberg, described it as “laughable”. Wellbeing was “doublespeak for higher taxes and more debt”. Frydenberg asked parliament to imagine Chalmers delivering his first budget, the one he will deliver on October 25, “fresh from his ashram deep in the Himalayas, barefoot, robes flowing, incense burning, beads in one hand, wellbeing budget in the other”. Read more here