How much will the Voice cost to run?

A fair bit, but not as much as some of the numbers the No campaign is throwing around. Let’s compare it to some other spending by our government. I made a graph for this one!

According to Parliament’s October 2023 Budget Review, there’s been $83 million budgeted to spend on the referendum itself. We don’t know exactly how much the Voice will cost to run once it’s been set up, but let’s assume it’s about the same as it costs to run the NIAA: $4.5 million per year. (Former PM Tony Abbott has been going around saying the NIAA costs $30 billion a year, but maths was never his strong point). There would be some cost savings, because some of the things that the NIAA do would be transferred over to the Voice. This covers salaries and operational costs.

As with any government agency or statutory body (like the High Court), they may run programs that cost more than this. That money would come from the annual government budget, same as it does for stuff like Centrelink, Border Force, etc.

So let’s compare this to other stuff that gets money in the Federal budget. I’m just picking some of the small items from this glossy budget PDF for the financial year 2022 to 2023. We spent $73 million on improving WA’s roads and transport. We spent $83 million on microgrids (independent power grids), which I think are a good way of making regional towns more resilient to floods and fires in the future. And we spent $203 million on prevention of domestic abuse.

But since I’m already annoyed with some of the spending by the Albanese government, let’s compare these numbers to things I think are much less useful.

The AUKUS submarine deal is going to cost us $3 billion in the next three years. So let’s call that $1 billion per year. And the Stage 3 tax cuts will cost us $20.4 billion in their first year, 2024. That’s in lost income from a huge number of tax cuts for people earning over $150,000 per year.

People often don’t realise how much of a difference there is between a million and a billion, but it’s easier to see with a graph.

Well, it’d be easier to see on a graph if you could even see the column for the Voice. Maybe if you squint?

So I’m not very worried about the cost of the Voice, whether that’s the referendum or the cost of running it.