The 2024-2025 National Budget will “go back to the basics” and have no surprises, says Minister of Finance and Deputy Prime Minister Professor Biman Prasad.
Prof Prasad told The Fiji Times online news portal, The Lens@177 in an interview yesterday that the budget formulation would give necessities such as road, water supply, drainage and health care priority.
“We have taken a very considered view of what a national development plan should look like,” Prof Prasad said.
“The three-year plan is going back to the basics.
“There will be a lot of announcements in the budget looking at the basics of improving our roads, our water supply, drainage and health.
“This budget I have said very clearly that there will be no surprises.
“We’ve already foreshadowed what we intend to do for example we talked about dividend taxes in the last budget.”
He said they were discussing a number of other issues.
“We’ve had people talking about elements of price gouging, people complaining about prices, I’ve received a list from FCCC (Fijian Competition and Consumer Commission) which said quite a few prices have gone down.
“But no changes to personal income tax or value added tax because we want to give consistency and stability.”
Prof Prasad highlighted the Government’s efforts to stabilise the economy after the 2019 contraction.
“In 2019, the economy had a negative growth, because in 2018 before the election, they were borrowing and spending because they wanted to be popular and win the election.
“We had the fourth largest contraction of all the economies in the world because of what was happening in 2019.
“This is what people need to understand, in 15 months if you look at the improvement in some of the health centres, hospitals, sugar industry where Government came in.”
Prof Prasad said they had to bring back some of economic sense in their budget and “not the borrowing that former attorney-general Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum used to practice”.
“So my first job as Minister of Finance and as Coalition Government was to stabilise our finances.
“We looked at the TAX we looked at the expenditure and I think it’s gone down very well to the people.
“I didn’t become the Minister of Finance to become popular, I became the Minister of Finance to sort out our economy and bring stability.”
