Key events
When the Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook (Myefo) is released on Wednesday, it will show higher interest rates are putting additional pressure on the budget.
Borrowing costs will now overtake the NDIS to be the fastest growing area of Commonwealth spending. To account for this Treasury has updated its assumption for the average cost of new borrowing to be 4.7% – compared to 3.4% at the time of the 2023-24 budget.
This increase will cost the budget $80bn more in interest payments over the 11 years to 2033-34.
Without this increase gross debt would be $94bn lower in 2033-34.
Meanwhile, gross debt as a share of GDP is now expected to peak at 35.4% of GDP, 1.2 percentage points lower than forecast at the 2023-24 Budget and 9.5 percentage points lower than forecast at the Pre-election Economic and Fiscal Outlook 2022.
Treasurer Jim Chalmers said higher interest rates are “hurting households and they’re hurting the budget as well”.
With higher rates, the interest on the trillion dollars of debt left to us by the Coalition is costing taxpayers more.
The interest bill on the Coalition’s wasted decade is now the fastest growing expense in the Budget.
We’re getting government debt on a better trajectory, but that debt is becoming more expensive to service.
Our responsible economic management is getting the Budget in much better nick but higher interest rates aren’t helping.
VCE results go online
Caitlin Cassidy
Year 12 students across Victoria are the first off the block in the nation to receive their final exam results today.
Since 7am marks have been live online for the VCE, with Tasmania to follow on Wednesday and NSW and the ACT on Thursday.
This year 57,601 students are graduating with their VCE, a completion rate of 97.4%.
Some 51,214 students completed the traditional VCE, while a further 6,387 completed the new VCE vocational major – an applied learning certificate that is unscored (11% of the cohort).
In total, 246,470 study scores will be issued to students across the VCE courses. Of those, 21,754 have been marked 40 or above (in the top 8.8%) and 656 are the maximum score of 50 (0.3% of the cohort).
Victoria’s minister for education, Ben Carroll, congratulated students receiving their VCE results.
Getting through year 12 is not for the faint hearted – but it’s important to remember that this is only one step in your life journey – there have never been more choices available such as university, Tafe, traineeships, and work.
Students can access their VCE results here.
Good morning
Emily Wind
And happy Monday – I hope you enjoyed your weekend and stayed cool during that heatwave! I’m Emily Wind and I’ll be bringing you our rolling coverage today.
Making news today: the mid-year economic and fiscal outlook (Myefo) will be released on Wednesday, showing an $80bn hit to the budget overt he next decade from interest rate rises. Treasurer Jim Chalmers said:
Higher interest rates are hurting households and they’re hurting the budget as well, and that’s what our mid-year outlook will show on Wednesday.
Year 12 students across Victoria are the first off the block in the nation to receive their final exam results today. From 7am marks went live online for the VCE, with Tasmania to follow on Wednesday and NSW and the ACT on Thursday.
We will have more on these stories shortly.
Meanwhile, the Queensland premier, Annastacia Palaszczuk, announced her retirement from politics yesterday – and we will no doubt continue to see the fallout from this play out during the week before the caucus meets on Friday to elect a new leader.
You can read more about her announcement here and here, if you missed it yesterday.
If you see something that needs attention from the blog, you can get in touch with me on X/Twitter @emilywindwrites or via email: emily.wind@theguardian.com.
With that, let’s get started.
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