Will Jim Chalmers proceed with a federal wellbeing budget?

“Budgets,” writes economist, journalist and ABC broadcaster Peter Martin, “are usually three things: a statement of accounts, with measures that will have an impact on the accounts (and sometimes measures that won’t), as well as the legislation needed to authorise another year’s worth of expenditure.” An important omission in such steps is measuring their broader economic and social impacts.

Last year, treasurer Jim Chalmers handed down the commonwealth’s first Wellbeing Budget, defying the dry logic of traditional budgetary economics. In his