ANU report finds low income families hit hard by Budget

A new report from The Australian National University (ANU) has found proposed measures in the 2016-17 Budget would impact low income families with children more significantly than other families.

The report, written by Associate Professor Ben Phillips from the ANU Centre for Social Research and Methods, models a range of Budget measures that directly impact households, such as changes to family payments, childcare, taxation, tobacco excise and superannuation.

"The losses for the middle and top income groups are proportionately much less than low income families," he said.

"The main impacts in this analysis are from reduction in welfare payments, mostly family payments. Tobacco excise will also more significantly impact lower income families."

The report did however find that the Budget will have a lower impact on low income families than the previous two budgets.

"Analysis of the 2015 Budget shows that Budget to have an impact more than twice that of this Budget for the lowest income families and a roughly similar impact (very little) for high and middle income families for 2018-19," he said.

The full report, Distributional Modelling of Budget 2016, can be downloaded at the ANU website.