School funding
John Daley, the chief executive at the Grattan Institute, says one of the government's smart moves is the change to school funding, which benefits those schools at the bottom, in the middle and at the top.
It's one, he said, that "acknowledges that there are a number of schools that are substantially underfunded at the moment and move them up to a sensible level of funding much more quickly than previous policy plans".
In terms of those elite schools that have been "over funded relative to everyone else for a long time", the package "brings them down to the same level much more quickly".
For the schools in the middle, it gives them more money per student than the Liberal Government had promised previously, and it gives them less money than the current legislation promises, Mr Daley said.
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But he said that was "sensible" because the current legislation promised them a nominal increase in funding of 3.6 per cent per student per year.
"That's much faster than inflation.
"Given current wages growth, they’ve been getting an increased level of real funding per year."
He said non-elite schools could use that well.
"So a school can for example go hire specialist teachers that will both obviously provide high quality teaching but will also help improve the skills of the other teachers that they've got," he said.
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Higher education
Mr Daley said the higher education funding change was ultimately a good move. The new measure means universities will get less money from the government per student, and students will have to pay more for their course fees and start paying back their loan with lower incomes.
"You might say, 'well geez all of that is taking money away from higher education, why is that good policy?'
"And the answer is, well we've seen a very large increase in higher education provisions, so there's far more people going through higher education than there used to be.
"That's only going to be sustainable if students pay a higher proportion of their course fees."
He said such demand-driven system would "ultimately be in the country's interest".
"It's a good example of something that is a tough decision… but also in the long run leads to a much more sustainable model that means that higher education can continue to be provided to a large a number of people."
Research by the Grattan Institute found that people with a higher education typically earned "substantially" more than those without one.
For that reason, Mr Daley said, it was "reasonable to ask them to pay a proportion of an education that "at least on average sets them up for life, that pays off for them".
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Tax increase
The Treasurer Scott Morrison announced on Tuesday night the Budget measure that tax rates would go up by 0.5 per cent, a policy Mr Daley endorsed.
He said Australians had been living beyond our means for a "quite a long time", about nine years.
"For every $10 that the Commonwealth spends, it’s only collecting about $9. So that's a problem - you can't live on the credit card forever, we all know how that ends."
Past governments said they were going to fix this by cutting expenditure.
"Given the size of the problem – it's about $38 billion dollars a year – it was never plausible they could find that in spending cuts, or plausible politically that was going to be a saleable strategy.
This year's budget repair, which both reduces spending and increase revenue, is a much sounder avenue to budget repair... and solves part of the problem by increasing income taxes," Mr Daley said.
Big data
The government announced it would invest $500 million into a Modernisation Fund to the Innovation Agency of the Prime Minister's Office.
This includes the 'Data Exchange Platform', which provides big data to government agencies to design effective policies, and the 'Data Integration Partnership Australia', which allows the data to be shared between agencies.
Tom Burton, the publisher of public policy news outlet The Mandarin, told SBS World News the manoeuvre was a "very powerful change proposition".
He said the Data Exchange Platform would allow the government to make better informed decisions, such as how to prevent domestic violence, by analysing trends in big data.
"To date they've had to do it [form policies] in a very bespoke way," Mr Burton said.
Now policies will be formed in "a much more robust, practical way".
While the Data Integration Partnership Australia, Mr Burton said, will help government "much more quickly share information".
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What's less-effective
Housing affordability
Mr Daley said the Budget package on housing affordability was a "missed opportunity".
The government announced negative gearing would remain, and a $250 million package to provide tax benefits for people using superannuation to fund a first home deposit.
Up to $30,000, based on contributions of $15,000 per year starting on July 1 – money that would otherwise go into superannuation – can be used in the scheme.
Both members of a couple buying their first home can use the scheme.
"The short answer is that collectively they are not going to make a material difference, you’re not going to be able to see it with a scanning electron microscope.
"What they haven’t done is the things they could control and that would really make at least a difference big enough to matter," said Mr Daley.
That would have been to reduce the capital gains tax discount and eradicate negative gearing.
"And if you really wanted to go for gold, then include owner-occupied housing pension assets test.
"Those are the things that would really help and they would also make a substantial contribution to budget repair so they would be a significant double-whammy, if you like, in terms of both helping a policy outcome that we care about and contributing to budget repair that we care about.”
