OUR State Budget (Victoria, Australia) is out today, both in print and online.
Over the past few days there has been television coverage of the state treasurer flipping through the printed copy of his budget documents, but I wonder how much it costs to print all those copies.
This state government, like most governments, promotes environmental concerns but still prints the eight-part budget with lots of pages, keynote speech (16), strategies (101), service delivery (417), Capital (216), Financial Statement (269), Overview (64), Gender Equality (31) and COVID Debt Repayments (31) giving 1150 printed pages.
I didn’t even bother to look at the 12 press releases. It would be expensive to print and realistically a waste of resources. Why couldn’t it just be available in PDF format?
In summary, all it really says is that the government will spend a lot of money and the citizens will pay a lot of taxes – 15 words.
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Cap this
While reading one of numerous reviews of the show “Succession”, a show I love, I found one that commented on the clothes they were wearing.
The character, Kendall Roy, was wearing a brand of waterproof baby cashmere basketball cap, the brand was one I am unfamiliar with, but it did look nice.
The part that didn’t look nice was the price for the cap of £535 or US$660 which seems a lot even for a billionaire.
For me, it seems that spending more than a week’s wages on anything, but a suit is wasteful. There are so many people wearing recycled or hand-me-down clothes that a better approach is needed.
There seem to be few realistic ways to feed and clothe the world but maybe a few less billionaires – apparently there are about 3,000 of them, and a lot more people getting enough food to eat would be a start.
We all want the naked truth but a few more clothes might help to shield a lot of people. dfitzger@melbpc.org.au/PN
