WATCH: April 3, 2022 Whitsunday Weekly E-News

Hi, I’m  Annette Neil from PRD Whitsunday

A real hot topic at the moment is the increasing cost of living. We're seeing fuel prices skyrocketing above two dollars all over Australia.

Last week, the federal government announced their budget for the upcoming year. We saw them focus on the rising cost of living.

With what they have delivered in that budget, it will be interesting to see if these items are delivered.

Given that we have an election coming up, a federal election, the opposition has come out and said that they plan to go forward with a slightly different budget.
It will be interesting to see which of these items do stay, moving forward, if we were to have a change of government.
We’ve heard about 'lamington' offset, or the low and middle-income tax offset which has been increased in this coming year.
Depending on which tax bracket you fall into, that amount can vary, but it can be as much as 1500, so that's a nice little bonus.

We've also seen the government slash the fuel excise for the next six months in half. That also contributes somewhere circa 20 cents per liter, saving back into people's pockets.
When you live regionally as we do up here, we can drive quite long distances so that could be quite a big difference to both individuals and also small business owners that are operating a few vehicles, tradies, those sorts of things.

Now they did announce a few changes to the different home guarantee schemes that the government has been running too. We’ve had things in the past, such as the first home buyer deposit scheme and the family deposit scheme. For single income or single families to get them into properties for as low as 5% deposits with the government guaranteeing the balance of their 20% deposits with the bank.

We've seen a new scheme be announced as part of the expansion over the next three years.
We're going to see 50 000 places allocated and then 35 000 places for these schemes broken down into various figures contributing to each of those schemes after those three years.

The government has announced a new scheme which is the regional home guarantee. That's going to allow people with as little as a five per cent deposit to purchase a home in a regional area, and to qualify for that, and you either have to be an Australian citizen or a permanent resident.

It's a little bit different to a lot of the other schemes and boosters and things that have been available in that you don't have to be a citizen.
You can be a permanent resident, or people migrating here from various overseas countries will qualify.
Now all the information around that is not released as yet by the government

I'm sure we'll have a bit more of a breakdown of how you can qualify for that, but I would imagine that our postcode here will be eligible.

To qualify, you don't have to be a first home buyer. You have to have not owned a property for the last five years, and it has to be in a regional area. It will be interesting to see how that one plays out now.

Good news overall, with quite a few deliveries in some immediate cash to people, to help with the rising cost of living.

I think it'll be interesting to see what happens moving forward.