Governments of all stripe have a bad habit. When it wants us to do something, it pays us to do it. Buy an electric car, and the fringe benefits tax disappears. Put a battery on the garage wall, and the Commonwealth picks up about 30 per cent of the cost. Take out private health cover, and there is a rebate for that too.
Each of these programs arrives with a headline figure and a press conference. None of them arrives with an honest account of what it costs to run, to police, and to clean up when it goes wrong.
That is the bill nobody is counting.
This year the Commonwealth will spend $18.2 billion on Family Tax Benefit, $17 billion on the Child Care Subsidy, and $7.9 billion rebating private health insurance premiums. The Child Care Subsidy alone is forecast to climb past $21 billion by 2029–30.
Services Australia costs $6.2 billion a year to run. How much of that goes to administering subsidies, rebates and incentives for comfortable households, rather than supporting people with nothing? The annual report does not say. Neither do the budget papers.
Then there are the programs built to steer behaviour rather than support anyone.
The Cheaper Home Batteries Program was costed at $2.3 billion before the 2025 election. A loophole that paid out big subsidies for oversized systems pushed estimates past $14 billion before the government scaled it back. It now sits at about $7.2 billion over four years. Batteries are great, but do we really need to incentivise it? Doesn’t the power bill already do that?
Similarly, the electric vehicle tax break costs $1.35 billion a year in forgone revenue. Tax Office figures obtained by the Australian Financial Review show 30.6 per cent of novated leases using the exemption went to people earning more than $190,000.
It is also a subsidy nobody needs. Petrol in New England is above $2 a litre. Diesel is closer to $3. At those prices, the reason to switch is already on the price board at every service station.
If an electric car makes sense for a household, the fuel bill will make the case on its own. If it does not, a tax break that flows mostly to high earners on salary packages will not change that for anyone outside the capital cities.
That is city-biased middle-class welfare dressed up as climate policy. And the cheque is only half of it.
Every one of these programs needs people to process claims, systems to pay them, and inspectors to check that what was paid for was delivered. That machinery does not appear on the program’s price tag. It is buried in departmental running costs, scattered across agencies, and almost never reported against the policy it serves.
When it is reported, the picture is not pretty.
The Australian National Audit Office looked at the Child Care Subsidy and found that in 2023–24 an estimated $484.1 million, or 3.6 per cent of the program, was lost to incorrect payments, including fraud and non-compliance. Over six years, estimated non-compliance came to $2.66 billion.
Over the same period, the Department of Education identified $13 million in fraud. It recovered $116,707.
The auditor found the management and oversight of compliance in the subsidy was only “partly effective”.
Robodebt is always the clanger example of just how badly we do compliance and what an awful sinkhole of taxpayers money it is. $600m was spent raising and trying to collect $751m in debt – and ultimately it recouped $0, and cost payers an additional $2.4b in a Royal Commission and financial redress. And a few lost lives. Good job.
The battery scheme has its own problems brewing. The Clean Energy Regulator inspected 1,278 installations between July 2025 and April 2026. That is about half of one per cent of the systems installed. Of those it checked, 60.8 per cent were substandard and 1.2 per cent were unsafe. Pink bats all over again, just waiting for the body count to be revealed.
There’s plenty more examples: we, the tax payer, fund the subsidy intended to socially engineer a politically desirable outcome, we fund the regulator or compliance team that makes sure it was done right, and – far, far, too often – we fund the clean up when it wasn’t.
The compliance is also far from even-handed. Last financial year Services Australia raised 2.4 million debts worth $2.5 billion against Centrelink recipients. It ran 160,500 payment assurance interventions, received more than 85,000 tip-offs, and completed 766 fraud investigations. JobSeeker recipients report their income every fortnight and meet mutual obligations to keep a payment of $833.70 – well below the poverty line.
Nobody asks the novated lease holder on $190,000 to report anything.
We police poverty and subsidise comfort, and we only bother to count the cost of one of them.
New England pays its share of all this and gets little of it back. For example, Mitchell Institute analysis found the New England electorate had the lowest access to childcare in New South Wales, with four children for every place. Families here fund a subsidy many of them cannot use, because there is no centre to use it in.
A tax break on a new electric car leased through a salary package is worth a lot to a public servant in Canberra. It is worth very little to a farmhand in Delungra, with no public charging infrastructure for miles and a genuine safety concern should they not make it home. You can’t hitch back to the farm and pick up a jerry can of battery power.
None of this is an argument against helping people. It is an argument for knowing what help costs, what help is actually helping, and being real about not wasting public money in search of cheap votes. That means being transparent about the real cost of every initiative.
Every program that pays households (or business) to change their behaviour should come with a full price: the payment, the administration, the compliance, and the losses. A clear ROI would be great too, although may be interesting to calculate. Publish it every year, against the program, so voters can see it.
If a subsidy, rebate, incentive or grant program, cannot survive that test, cannot show a number on paper of the return to the nation, it should not survive the budget process at all.
Treasurer Jim Chalmers needs to find about $11 billion in cuts by December. Easier said than done, but he could trying starting by asking for genuinely transparent numbers.
End Rant.
Dr RK (Kath) Crosby is the CEO of research and strategy company KORE CSR, former strategist for the Australian Democrats, and holds a PhD in political behaviour. She is also a well known migraine and health advocate, and the Publisher of New England Times and North Coast Times.
All opinion and comment on New England Times Engage is the opinion of the writer and not New England Times.
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