Victoria state budget 2025 winners and losers: families, health and public transport benefit as net debt climbs
Here are the winners and losers.
Families with school kids (and their grandparents)
If you're Victorian and under 18, then from 2026 a new $5 youth Myki card will be your ticket to ride public transport – for free.
In the 2025-26 budget there's $318m over four years so that every kid in Victoria – more than 1 million of them, the government says – will no longer have to pay when they catch a bus, tram or train.
The policy will save parents up to $755 per kid in annual public travel costs. And the free travel will be for kids from all families, not just those on lower incomes.
(There's also free public transport on the weekend for seniors.)
There's $400 for eligible kids to help pay for camps, sports and excursion, an increase from the previous $154 for primary school kids, and $256 for high school students.
There are more than 65,000 Get Active Kids vouchers for concession card holders.
There's an extra $1.5bn to expand existing schools and build new ones.
Lower income Victorian households will also get $100 towards off their energy bills.
Health
The Allan government has committed an extra $11.1bn to health, including $9.3bn boost for hospital funding. There's $634m to open and 'operationalise' nine new or upgraded hospitals right across Victoria, including opening the Footscray hospital and community hospitals Craigieburn, Cranbourne and Phillip Island.
Included in the total additional funding, there's $84m for paramedics, and $58m to help emergency departments see patients sooner.
A trial plan allowing pharmacists to offer a wider range of service – such as the resupply of contraceptive pills and treatment of urinary tract infections without the need for a doctor's script – will be made permanent and expanded.
Pharmacists will now be able to prescribe medicines for other ailments, including allergies and high blood pressure.
Commuters
There's an almost $5bn public transport blitz, including $727m to 'switch on' Melbourne's Metro Tunnel, which is due to open by the end of the year.
The budget also includes $98.7m to boost service frequency across seven metropolitan and regional train lines.
But the big spending item is the $4.1bn to begin major works at Sunshine station, which the Melbourne Airport rail line will eventually travel through.
There's also nearly $1bn in a 'better road blitz' to fix potholes and surfaces in 2025-26 alone.
Businesses
After being slugged with taxes, the treasurer made a point of saying their would be no new imposts on businesses, who have complained that they are copping the brunt of budget repair.
This budget is distinctly more corporate sector friendly, with hundreds of millions of dollars over four years to 'help new businesses find new opportunities to expand and attract investment'. That includes mentoring and services to boost the capacity of small businesses and exporters.
There's a $150m Victorian Investment Fund, a third of which will be dedicated to the regions, and $4m to help boost the capacity and skills of entrepreneurs.
The budget also includes $240m to fund the government's economic growth statement, which includes measures to cut red tape and ease the regulatory burden on firms, and help train up workers.
The public service
The treasurer, Jaclyn Symes, announced the budget assumes 1,200 fewer full-time public servants, with the potential for that number to push towards 3,000 people once the government's review of the bureaucracy is completed by 30 June.
Symes said that doesn't necessarily involve thousands of redundancies, as departments have already been trimming head counts by not replacing workers as they go.
The job reductions are not supposed to come from frontline services.
Would-be homeowners
The premier, Jacinta Allan, in October said she would be the leader 'who got millennials into homes'. But there's no new, grand vision in this budget to address one of the country's major intergenerational issues – unaffordable housing.
That's not to say there's nothing: there's an extra $249m – in partnership with the commonwealth – to pay for the infrastructure, like roads, sewerage and water, that the government says will facilitate an extra 4000 homes over four years.
The stamp duty concession for off-the-plan homes will be extended to October 2026, and eligibility will be expanded beyond first home buyers and owner occupiers in a move aimed to boosting construction of new properties.
Still, the 800,000 new homes by 2034 target does not look meaningfully closer.
Budget boffins
The country's self-appointed guardians of fiscal rectitude will find little to love in Victoria's 2025-26 budget, as the new treasurer pushed back fiscal repair to the never-never.
Despite achieving the first 'operating surplus' since the Covid lockdowns – a skinny $600m in 2025-26. But after accounting for infrastructure spending, the cash bottomline is $12.2bn in the red in the next financial year, with deficits as far as the eye can see.
The 'tough and difficult' fiscal measures under previous treasurer Tim Pallas have transformed into a big spending budget. The extra nearly $3bn in GST and commonwealth grants since the December budget update has been more than spent.
The government says it will keep net debt as a share of the Victorian government from going beyond its 25% target, and that's what the forecasts show. But lowering the burden is a job that has surely been pushed beyond the next election, due in November 2026.
Meanwhile, actual net debt levels continue to climb, at a faster pace than predicted in December, from an estimated $155.5bn by the middle of this year, to $194bn by June 2029.
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BBC News
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Now housed at the research facility Rothamsted Research, in Harpenden, the collection reflects many of the changes that human activity has inflicted on the planet in the past two centuries. Andy Macdonald, the current custodian of the archive at Rothamsted Research, affectionately known by colleagues as "Keeper of the Bottles", says that samples collected during the 1940s and '50s contain radioactive traces – reflecting the fallout from the era's nuclear weapons testing. But there's another unwelcome record which can be found in these bottles of ancient soil – the first emergence of microplastics. According to one famous estimate, we might consume up to 52,000 microplastics per year, and while that precise figure has been subsequently challenged, it's clear that they are entering the human body in significant quantities. Whether ingested through our food, the liquids we drink, or absorbed from the air we breathe, microplastics have become ubiquitous. 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The concept, according to Stephanie Wright, a researcher at Imperial College London who led the trial, is that many of us are unwittingly carrying out this exact experiment on our own bodies on a daily basis. The team copied some of the common ways through which many of us ingest microplastics, for example dipping plastic sealed tea bags in hot water or microwaving fluids in a plastic container, before asking the volunteers to drink the liquids and then attempting to follow what happens next. "We know that heating and hot water are the worst-case scenarios for plastic ingestion, and that can really facilitate the release of microplastics from commonly used plastic items," says Wright. "So we want to take some of these scenarios and try to see how many of these microplastics are actually absorbed across our gut and back into the blood." To assess this, Wright measured the volunteers' blood at repeated time points over the course of 10 hours. The data, when published later this year, will provide the first concrete information on the typical concentrations of microplastics which end up circulating around our bodies in the wake of a cup of tea or a microwaved ready meal, and their size. In the eyes of Wright, such information will represent another step on the path to better understanding the potential health risks for the average person. She predicts that the kinds of microplastics which reach the bloodstream are the smaller particles, but despite a range of investigations in animals and test tubes, we have almost no data on how a dose of microplastics might impact a typical healthy individual. "We need to know how much gets back in, compared to what was originally ingested," says Wright. "And then the greater concern is where they are ending up, and are they accumulating somewhere? It's very unlikely that our body is capable of completely breaking them down. 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Studies on bottled water, for example, have found that a single litre can contain as many as 240,000 different plastic particles of varying dimensions and materials. Among them, researchers identified no less than seven different categories of plastic, ranging from a form of nylon called polyamide to polystyrene. "There are numerous types of plastics, each with different compositions which degrade into various forms and shapes," says Verena Pichler, an associate professor of pharmaceutical chemistry at the University of Vienna, Austria. "The term microplastic doesn't capture the variability of what we're dealing with." The other challenge for researchers like Pichler is that in different people, various microplastics may be doing very different things. She points out that research has suggested certain plastic particles can absorb environmental toxins and carry heavy metals, while various chemicals added to plastic may interact with the network of hormones in the body. Nanoplastics (plastic particles which are less than one micrometre ins size), much smaller than microplastics which are five millimetres or less in length, may be even more damaging as they are small enough to be able to cross cellular membranes and gather within cells. Some microplastics have also been found to act as a hub for so-called antimicrobial resistance genes, which can then interact with bacteria, viruses, fungi or parasites to confer resistance against drugs. Couceiro is currently leading a project in Antarctica, collecting samples from the large quantities of wastewater discharged into the ocean from cruise ships, with the aim of better understanding the types of microplastics which tend to harbour these genes. "It sounds like a weird place to do this, but Antarctica has the lowest load of antimicrobial resistance genes so it's a good area to look at that because you don't have so much noise from other things," says Couceiro. Raffaele Marfella, professor of internal medicine and microplastics researcher at the University of Campania Luigi Vanvitelli in Naples, says that he suspects both microplastics and nanoplastics could be driving accelerated ageing. Marfella believes that they could be achieving this in several ways, including inducing blood vessel dysfunction, creating a growing burden of chronic low-grade inflammation, as well as altering cell behaviour in internal organs through the generation of DNA-damaging molecules called reactive oxygen species. This inflammatory response has already been identified in seabirds leading to a condition which has been dubbed "plasticosis" and Marfella feels it is plausible that this could also be happening in humans. It's a sentiment shared by Pichler, who was first drawn to this subject area after reading about the high concentrations of microplastics detected in human stool samples, and speculated that they may be linked to the rising prevalence of colorectal cancers. Her subsequent research has raised her suspicions that microplastic accumulation may be involved in elevating cancer risk in some way. More like this:• How plastic is getting into our food• Is it possible to reduce our exposure to microplastics?• What would happen if we stopped using plastic? "Studies suggest that microplastics may have a role in amplifying inflammation, which is concerning," says Pichler. "If an inflammatory response persists or is actively promoted by continuous exposure to plastics, this could have implications for tumour formation and disease progression. Although the direct role of microplastics in cancer development is still being investigated, existing scientific databases and studies indicate a probable connection." Because humans are consuming so many different types of plastic, Wright says that it's both unlikely and impractical, without vast sources of funding, for researchers to be able to identify a direct link between ingesting microplastics and one particular disease. This is unlike an environmental pollutant such as tobacco smoke, which has been shown to be a cause of lung cancer. "The variety of microplastics in the environment means that you just couldn't test every single possibility [in terms of the links between microplastics and disease], because that would be hundreds of experiments to run," Wright says. Marfella feels that the more pragmatic way forward is to try and identify thresholds for how much our bodies might be able to safely tolerate before the risk for toxicity and damage becomes too high. He says that his team is currently working towards this goal with the help of "vascular organoids" – lab-grown 3D structures made from real human cells, which resemble the blood vessels inside the human body, albeit in a petri dish. The scientists are exposing these artificial blood vessels to different types of plastics and in different doses. "We don't yet have a definitive threshold for toxicity, but we are starting to see patterns," says Marfella. "For example, preliminary data from animal models suggests that chronic exposure to 10-100 micrograms [10-100 millionths of a gram] of microplastics per kilogram of body weight per day, can induce measurable inflammatory and metabolic changes," he says. However, so far this research has been conducted on mice, and translating the results to humans is complex, Marfella explains. For example, this could be because of differences in metabolism, clearance mechanisms and sources of exposure, he says. Couceiro says that the risk may also vary depending on a person's underlying state of health, with older people or those with underlying health conditions being markedly more vulnerable to the effects of microplastics. Research studies have already suggested that microplastics or nanoplastics ingested by cancer patients may impact treatment success, with these tiny particles capable of altering the behaviour of cancer medicines in the body, for example by binding to these drugs and limiting the amount of the active ingredient that is released into tumours. Now, along with her team at the University of Portsmouth, Couceiro is attempting to understand whether certain doses of microplastics pose a greater risk for people with chronic asthma or other long-term respiratory diseases. "With asthma, we know that air quality is a massive thing, one of the major problems that initiates attacks," says Couceiro. "And if plastic particles are slightly worse than the other particles in the air, then we need to try and reduce their exposure to them." To do this, Couceiro is planning to examine samples of phlegm, the thick mucus coughed up from the lungs and airways, to see whether microplastics are present in particularly high quantities when patients are experiencing an exacerbation of their symptoms. She's also visiting the homes of vulnerable patients to measure air quality samples, to get an idea of the types of plastic particles that they're breathing in, and then test the impacts of those particles on samples of their cells. "If we can do this with enough people, we might be able to draw some general conclusions across a number of people with asthma or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and speak to them about what's in their homes and how they can avoid certain things," says Couceiro. Ultimately, like many researchers in the field of microplastics, Couceiro is hoping to gather enough data so that she can approach plastics manufacturers and make recommendations about how they can make their products safer. For example, a certain type of plastic might seem to be particularly implicated in triggering asthma attacks, or various chemicals in the plastic could be especially prone to leaching out and initiating toxic processes within the body, she says. "We know that microplastics are everywhere, even in the indoor environment. If they're in your air, you're still taking in microplastics at low levels when you're asleep," says Couceiro. "So we would like, if it's possible, to speak to manufacturers about how to avoid them, whether they can stop making certain plastics in the first place. For example, for people who go into hospital to be treated for respiratory diseases, the masks are plastic, and the tubing is plastic. So can we find better alternatives which prevent them getting into the system in the first place?" -- For trusted insights into better health and wellbeing rooted in science, sign up to the Health Fix newsletter, while The Essential List delivers a handpicked selection of features and more science, technology, environment and health stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook and Instagram.
Time Out
10-07-2025
- Time Out
The biggest new London park since 2012 has opened in the southwest
While central London continues to build skyscraper after skyscraper, the southwest of the city is busy adding parks. Thanks to the enormous expanse that is Richmond Park, SW is already one of the greenest corners of the Big Smoke. But it's just got even greener. Yesterday (July 9), a brand new park officially opened in Tooting. And it's the largest park to open in London since the 2012 Olympics. Springfield Park is spread over 32 acres and it's part of the new Springfield Village, which has been built on the site of a former Victorian mental health hospital and previously underused NHS land. The park has been opening in phases since 2023, but yesterday marked the first day that it was 100 percent available to the public. Inside, you'll find a pavilion café, amphitheatre, youth shelter, play areas, ponds, sensory gardens, 700 new trees, areas for informal sport and a trim trail. Mayor Sadiq Khan was there for the park's big launch. He said: 'Springfield Park is a great new facility and a key part of the transformation at Springfield Hospital that is providing much-needed affordable homes and green spaces for local people. 'Access to nature and secure, affordable housing are vital foundations for good physical and mental health, helping Londoners to live well and enabling our communities to thrive. It is a wonderful example of partners working together as we continue to build a fairer, greener and healthier London for everyone.' Harriet Gladwell-Phillips, the project lead for the Springfield and Tolworth Estate Partnership, added: 'Springfield Park is a shining example of what can be achieved when healthcare, community, and nature come together. 'We are proud to have supported south west London and St George's and the London Borough of Wandsworth in creating a park that not only enhances mental health and wellbeing but also enriches the local neighbourhood.'
