A Budget Is Not Just A Financial Document, It's A Moral One

Tuesday, May 3, 2016

How you judge today's federal budget depends what you think a budget is for. Conventional wisdom has it that the best budgets stimulate the most growth. Conventional cynicism says the winner budgets are the ones that give enough prizes to the right voters to lock in a majority come polling day.

Then there are those of us who agree with Martin Luther King Jnr, who maintained that a budget is not just a financial document, but a moral one. Speaking at the time of the Vietnam War, King believed that 'a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defence than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death'.

 Certainly a budget, as a comprehensive statement of how the national treasure will be spent, is a telling reflection of where our collective heart lies, or at least where the government of the day thinks it does. It reflects what we value and what we value less -- whose thriving we think important, and whose we aren't much bothered about.

Governments often appeal to our sense of the common good, but increasingly they treat us less as citizens in a democracy and more as consumers. In reality we're a bit of both. Sometimes we can be persuaded to view political and economic choices through the prism of the common good, but most of the time self-interest reigns. Anyone involved in politics knows this.

Tim Costello is the CEO of World Vision

First published in the Huffington Post

Opinion Pieces

Back to all Results