Citizens’ Guide to National Budget launched for enhanced transparency and public understanding of the budget

People will now be easily able to understand the 2024-2025 National Budget as the Citizens’ Guide to the National Budget has been launched to enhance transparency and accountability.

While launching the guide, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Finance, Professor Biman Prasad says national budget documents are sometimes found to be too wordy, not very accessible, not understood by the general public, very macroeconomic and sometimes they are often shrouded in a little bit of complexity and use of technical jargons making it difficult for a lot of people to understand how the Government raises revenue and how we dispense it.

He says with the guide, they aim to demystify this process and present the budget in a clear, accessible format that everyone can understand.

Professor Prasad says the guide is not just a document but it is in fact, a promise of transparency, accountability, and inclusivity in the Government and it presents a significant step towards fostering a stronger relationship between the Government and the people.

He says the guide provides our citizens with a user-friendly budget that outlines the Government's priorities, budget processes, macroeconomic outlook, major revenue and expenditure policies, expenditure allocation and the medium-term fiscal framework.

The Deputy Prime Minister further says with the beginning of the new financial year yesterday, the Financial Management Information System also came online that replacing an approximately two-decade-old system where the payroll was developed about 40 years ago.

While speaking during the launch, Senior Economics Lecturer at USP, Janesh Sami said the guide will enhance transparency, which is very good in terms of building economic confidence.

He says when governments try to hide things, it may have a very negative impact on the private sector and consumer confidence.

Sami says coming up with a budget is one thing but implementing is another thing so he hopes that sometime next year, we are able to find out which initiatives were successful, where we did not do well, and how we are improving such initiatives.

While acknowledging the Government’s commitment to citizen engagement, transparency, accountability and integrity, Fiji Council of Social Services Executive Director, Vani Catanasiga gave credit to the Minister and his team for continuing to do that even amid criticism from civil society about how they should better use the resources of the country.

She says despite all of the advocacy, the commitment of FCOSS is to support the work of the Government of Fiji and if it means that they address some of the gaps, then they will do that.

Catanasiga hopes an app will be developed in the future for a better understanding of the budget.

Meanwhile, Dialogue Fiji Executive Director Nilesh Lal says there is a lot of misinformation relating to the economy and people's understanding of the economy, their views on how well the economy is doing and about resource allocation in relation to the budget are unfortunately shaped by political narratives.

He says it is very important that we have something like the guide that demystifies the budget.

Lal has committed to distributing the guide amongst the people that they interact with in the communities as well as advocating for its utilization.

The Citizens’ Guide to the National Budget will be available on the Ministry of Finance website.