National Party Budget Strategy

Yeah, well, look, I think the the bigger question is what's the problem we're trying to solve? And when you look at it, we've gone from seven workers to one retiree. I think very shortly in the next few years, I think we're at four to one today, we'll be at two to one very quickly. Very big proportion of government spending going forward with an aging population. I think it gets up to you know, we're at sort of eighteen percent now. I think it gets up to twenty-five percent pretty quickly. And particularly in the next few years, it really starts to accelerate on us. So the problem is the system is essentially um you know going to become unworkable and unaffordable, and it just means that that's money we don't put into health and education, or we end up loading up our kids with a hell of a lot of debt. Are you? So if you take a step back, you've actually got to say three things. One is how do you I think one of the things we're we're really quite hot on, and you've seen the National Party policy from November last year. We've started some of it in government, but we've got to step up the contributions to match Australia 12% by 2032. The second thing, I think there is a genuine question about age, you know. Um, if our peer countries like Canada, the UK, and Australia found a way through it, surely we can do it in a very sensible graduated lots of signalling of time uh to deal with it. But that is, you know, people are living four years longer than they were in 2005 now. So and I think the other bit was I've seen your conversations around means testing. I think you've got to be quite careful with that because people need certainty going forward, and you know, you could see future governments changing thresholds.