The Australian Government dropped their Budget last night, and as expected, it contained some financial sweeteners to help people with cost of living but not a lot for mental health and suicide prevention.

The big ticket items were -

· Tax Cuts: A 1% tax cut for people on incomes between $18,201 and $45,000 will be implemented, increasing to 2% in 2027. They will also reduce all HECS/HELP debts by 20% as a one-of benefit.

· Energy bill relief: A one-off rebate of $150 for energy bills for all Australian households will be provided from July 2025.

· Better GP access –New Urgent Care Clinics will be opened to ease pressure on Emergency Rooms and incentive programs implemented to boost bulkbilling

· Access to medicines – The price of PBS-listed medicines will be reduced from $31 to $25 for those without concession cards and frozen at $7.70 for those with cards. A new treatment for major depression has also been listed on the PBS.

· Mental health support – Additional budget was provided for digital mental health services including QLife, as well as bushfire resilience activities in rural and regional Australia and a specialist support program for First Responders.

· Housing – A new ‘Help to Buy’ scheme will provide assistance to those on low incomes who are looking to purchase housing and $6m has been allocated to Housing and Homelessness organisations to develop new solutions.

· NDIS – Continuation of the Scheme with a large chunk of new funding to improve ‘fraud detection’.

· Autism – Over $40m has been dedicated to the implementation of the National Autism Strategy.

If you’d like to learn more about any of these, you can find the full Budget papers here Budget.gov.au | Budget 2025–26

What do you think?!

We’d love to hear what you think about this budget. Will any of these announcements make a big difference to your life? What is the most useful, and what opportunities have they missed.

Let us know your thoughts and we’ll include them in a SANE Community response that will distributed to key government and health sector partners (anonymously, of course!)