Swan hits out at coalition over costings


The coalition's refusal to submit its policies for costing unless the source of a Treasury leak is investigated makes them a "laughing stock", Treasurer Wayne Swan says.

The opposition expects to see a $2.44 billion budget saving from scrapping Labor's National Broadband Network because of the interest it would not have to pay.

However, Treasury analysis, dated July 5, cast doubt on the figure, saying the savings would only be $1.6 billion, leaving an $800 million discrepancy, Fairfax reported on Tuesday.

Coalition finance spokesman Andrew Robb vowed on Wednesday to withhold 20 policies from budget costings until the source of the leak was investigated.

Mr Swan said the opposition had only submitted about 10 per cent of its almost $30 billion in promises to the finance department and Treasury for scrutiny.

"That says to me they have got a cost blowout," he told reporters in the northern Queensland town of Mackay.

"That says to me they are a threat to the surplus."

Mr Swan said the coalition had "become a laughing stock" and Mr Robb's comments were "childish".

Another bloody thread on the same topic.  For christs sake Imcrook you are the biggest spammer on these boards with no respect for the rules.

What a joke.

Well I will say I do tend to agree with Mr Swan.  What a joke the liberals are for not submitting their policies for costings.  Yes Mr Swan they are a laughing stock, that's quite right Mr Swan.

wrote on Aug 11^th, 2010 at 9:35pm:

Well I will say I do tend to agree with Mr Swan.  What a joke the liberals are for not submitting their policies for costings.  Yes Mr Swan they are a laughing stock, that's quite right Mr Swan.

Why are you showing your ignorance of things political?

I will REPEAT ... The Government is the only lot who can actually get the details from The Treasury.  The Opposition can NOT see those files.

Now, have you got it?  

Until the next Government gets ELECTED  by us, the taxpayers, only Gillard and company know how much they have spent and what OUR bill is.

Are you stupid or what?

Robb is still half-heartedly carrying on about the recent alleged Treasury 'leak'...

His confected outrage doesn't seem to be cutting through - perhaps he's going for the Biggest Right Whinger award!?

Meantime, it would seem that the broader electorate still isn't buying the Libs' thinly-veiled scrutiny evasion tactic, of packing up the bucket and spade and running like spoilt toddlers from the sandpit and shovelling crap elsewhere...

Tim Colebatch savages the coalition:
http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/coalition-cuts-amount-to-just-01-of-budget-spending-20100811-11zss.html

Quote:

The Age front page: Libs shun cost scrutiny Some choice extracts: On the Coalition’s own costings, the net impact of its plans would be to reduce spending by just $796 million, and raise taxes by $469 million. … If Labor has been ‘’spending like a drunken sailor”, the Coalition plans to join the party. … In fiscal terms, the two parties will go to the election with identical policies. … This is probably true even if, as many suspect, the real reason the Coalition is now threatening to refuse to send its policies for costing is that it knows that some were too optimistic – big time. … The Coalition is now doing a dummy spit and threatening to boycott the costings process because Labor leaked that to the media. Well, guys, if you want us to elect you to be our government, you need to be made of tougher stuff. … The reality is, the Coalition has come up with excuse after excuse to delay submitting its proposals

Did anyone else see Swan BSing on the 7:30 report?
What a goose!

the costings leak has been reported to the federal police for official action.

last electi0on the alp did not submit their costing till the very last 1 hour that they could.
libs will do theirs many days prior ot the deadline

Sprintcyclist wrote on Aug 13^th, 2010 at 12:46pm:

the costings leak has been reported to the federal police for official action. last electi0on the alp did not submit their costing till the very last 1 hour that they could. libs will do theirs many days prior ot the deadline

The fact that the ALP submitted their costings so late last time seems to be coveniently ignored by the left.

Sprintcyclist wrote on Aug 13^th, 2010 at 12:46pm:

the costings leak has been reported to the federal police for official action.

What's the bet that: the Libs drop this like a hot potato as soon as the election is over - regardless of who wins office!?

After the Grech scandal, methinks that it is highly likely that the Libs still have one or more partisan insiders in Treasury - and that they themselves cynically-orchestrated the leak, as a pre-meditated excuse not to release most of their dodgy costings for proper scrutiny...

Perhaps there is even mention of the hitherto undisclosed agenda to increase the GST in there somewhere!?

Either way, after all their negative campaigning, their crocodile tears are not resonating well with an increasingly-sceptical electorate!

May Karma be generous to the self-servingly divisive, dishonest and draconian religious righteous bigots, who have hijacked the Liberal Party!

wrote on Aug 11^th, 2010 at 9:23pm:

Swan hits out at coalition over costings The coalition's refusal to submit its policies for costing unless the source of a Treasury leak is investigated makes them a "laughing stock", Treasurer Wayne Swan says. Mr Swan said the coalition had "become a laughing stock" and Mr Robb's comments were "childish".

Mr Fluffy Duck may have come down in the last shower, but I certainly recall before the last Federal election Labor not releasing their policies for treasury scrutiny until just prior to the election.
And to be fair, how much did it matter then.
Labors programs have been shown to be costing far more than they guesstimated at the time then anyway.
And Fluffy Duck better look around if he hears people laughing, the slapnut.
Because they are not laughing with him.

Here's an interesting retrospective assessment of the impact of the Charter that was introduced by the Libs in the first instance...

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/10/17/1097951555335.html


Quote:

Charter of Budget Honesty distorts election campaigns By Ross Gittins October 18, 2004 If you're not a close observer, you'd never notice: the Charter of Budget Honesty's intention of improving the financial information going to voters at election time is backfiring badly. The charter's provisions are making us less well informed rather than better, they're encouraging profligacy more than prudence and they're heavily biased in favour of the incumbent. The charter has two provisions affecting elections: it requires the secretaries to the Treasury and Finance Department to prepare a Pre-election Economic and Fiscal Outlook report (the PEFO - "pee-foe") within 10 days of the start of the campaign and it permits both parties to submit their spending promises to the two departments for public costing during the campaign. The first thing to note is that the charter has heightened an existing tendency for Australian campaigns to put far more emphasis on the detailed costing of promises than is the case with, say, American presidential elections or British general elections. This antipodean preoccupation with "where the money's coming from" and exactly what particular promises would cost probably originated with an incident in the 1987 campaign. Paul Keating scored a mighty blow against John Howard's Opposition when he exposed a large but simple error in the arithmetic of its promised tax cut. In his three campaigns as Treasurer, Peter Costello has laboured mightily to deliver a similar killer punch against Labor. He hasn't succeeded. And this time he damaged his own credibility when he staked his reputation as Treasurer on a claim to have found a $700 million black hole in Labor's tax package. Treasury found no black hole. Arguments about costings are hugely arcane and mind-numbing. They turn voters off rather than informing them. Even so, it would be nice to believe all the emphasis on bean-counting discourages the parties from making extravagant promises. It would be nice to believe it, but the evidence runs to the contrary. For a start, experience suggests the process prompts more restraint during times when the budget's in deficit. It certainly prompts little restraint when the budget's well in surplus. The charter's provision for the production of a PEFO was probably motivated by the experience of the 1996 election, when the campaign was conducted on the basis of outdated budget-time estimates subsequently revealed to have understated the deficit. But what happens when, far from toning down the budget-time estimates, the PEFO discovers there's a lot more lolly to play with? We've discovered the answer: both sides take it as a licence to step up their spending promises. This is a helpful development? The two department secretaries must certainly have realised exactly how the pollies would react when they revised up their projections of the four budget surpluses out to 2007-08 from a total of less than $12 billion to one of more than $25 billion. So why on earth did they do it? Because they weren't playing games. Because they felt they had no choice given the established rules of the exercise. The new information they had to incorporate since the budget was the actual outcome for last financial year. Far more revenue flowed in the door than had been expected in May, while a fair bit less spending flowed out. The three "out-year" figures for the surplus aren't proper forecasts, they're merely mechanical projections based on the technical assumption that economic growth, employment, inflation and wages will each be at their long-run average. Take the inescapable fact that revenue in the base year was a lot stronger than expected and spending a lot weaker, combine this with the arbitrary assumption that the economy will stay full steam ahead for another four years and you get the huge upward revision we saw. But here we find another of the charter's unintended consequences. Because of their mechanical nature, the out-year projections of the budget surplus are provided for purely illustrative purposes. They offer us a rough idea, but aren't intended to be taken literally. It suits the pollies on both sides, however, to treat them as rolled-gold certainties. In which case, the PEFO is likely to make promises more profligate rather than less - because it always assumes strong growth in the out-years. (Only after the election was out of the way did Mr Costello offer his disingenuous version of the obvious: in his opinion, Treasury's "forecasts" were "pretty optimistic".) In the good old days, once this year's budget (or, occasionally, the mid-year review) was on the table, the parties knew how much they had to play with and could safely get on with deciding and announcing their major policies. Not any more. Thanks to the advent of the PEFO, the Opposition can't be certain how much it has to spend until 10 days into a (usually) five-week campaign. (The Treasurer has the advantage of being able to seek continuous informal indications from his underlings.) See what this means? [...]

Quote:

See what this means? Labor seems to have miscalculated by announcing all its big and complicated policies - the tax and family package, the private school funding redistribution, Medicare Gold and the forests policy - during the breakneck campaign period. This left the media and the public with utterly insufficient time to examine and absorb the detail of these policies. Either their attractions went unappreciated or they were viewed with scepticism - too good to be true. It's possible Labor had other (wrong-headed) reasons for cramming the release of its policies into the campaign proper, but it's likely the lack of knowledge about how much it had to play with was an important factor. So here we have the advent of the PEFO acting to damage rather than enhance the democratic process. Labor - and all subsequent oppositions - will have to find a way of releasing its policies in broad terms early, then firming up the specifics during the campaign. Finally we come to the farcical operation of the provision for Treasury and Finance to cost the two parties' promises during the campaign. It's a farce because it's so heavily weighted against the Opposition - any opposition. The trouble is, the bureaucrats are the servants of the Government for almost 35 months out of every 36. Only during the election campaign's "caretaker period" are they given their independence and permitted to treat both sides equally. So the Government gets all the access it wants to the bureaucrats' expertise until just the last few weeks. And in the run-up to each election, it peppers them with hundreds of requests for the costing of hypothetical policies. What's more, the Government's pre-election contact with the bureaucrats is an "iterative" (trail-and-error) process: how much would it cost if we decided to do A? If you wanted to do A it would cost X, but if you did A1, which isn't very different, it would cost only Y. Oh, really. Thanks for the tip. This, of course, is the bureaucrats' role: to help their political masters achieve their policy objectives in ways that aren't impractical, open to abuse or needlessly expensive. Trouble is, the bureaucrats aren't permitted to give such helpful advice to the Opposition - not during the term, nor during the caretaker period. The Opposition just submits its policy costings and waits for the bureaucrats' public pronouncement. Any working papers or background information the Opposition supplies to the bureaucrats must be made public - and thus perused by their political opponents. The accurate costing of policy initiatives isn't something any old economist or accountant could do. It requires much specialised knowledge - knowledge few outside the bureaucracy possess. Further, it requires the making of assumptions - for instance, what proportion of people eligible for a new benefit will actually take it up - on which honest experts could disagree. And on which the bureaucrats could easily prove to be mistaken. So the scope for honest error is high - and doesn't prove much. In the highly charged atmosphere of an election campaign, however, the bureaucrats' word is treated as infallible and any significant instance of under-costing is paraded as proof positive of utter economic incompetence. You see now just how unbalanced the process is. The Government is largely feeding back to the bureaucrats their own costings, whereas the Opposition runs a high risk of slipping up somehow and being monstered by the Treasurer. The Opposition is obliged to pay big fees to the few organisations that stand a chance of matching Treasury's expertise but, as Access Economics found after the 2001 election, any outfit that sells its services to the Opposition can expect the bullying Mr Costello to punish them with references to "the Labor economic research firm". So now you understand why the Opposition seeks to minimise the risk of unreasonable embarrassment by dragging its feet and submitting its policies only at the last minute. That way, the bureaucrats' costing adjudications come too late to influence the campaign - or to inform voters. The costings process could be made both more even-handed and more informative to voters if both sides agreed that shadow ministers be permitted to discuss their policies (but not, of course, the Government's policies) in confidence with the department heads. Beyond that, the whole notion of the honesty charter's role in election campaigns needs rethinking. Ross Gittins is the Herald's Economics Editor.

Hmmnnn....the Libs cynically set this Charter up for their own benefit - now they are crying foul, when they are on the other side of the very same unlevel playing field that they themselves constructed and ruled with impunity for so long!?

LOL, look at what we have here, i hope Swan feels like the complete TOOL that he is:

Labor, Coalition in campaign costings row


Quote:

WAYNE Swan has admitted policies announced at Labor's official campaign launch on Monday will not be costed by Treasury, as he hammered the Coalition for refusing to have their prices checked. Labor is putting pressure on Tony Abbott's team over its spending promises, claiming to have found an $8 billion hole in a plan to index veterans' pensions announced yesterday.  Mr Abbott has said the plan is affordable in the long-term. The Coalition has until 5.30pm (AEST) to hand over its policies to Treasury experts for costings analysis, if it is to be done by the election.  But after a leaked confidential analysis of an earlier policy brought reports of an alleged $800 million shortfall, the Coalition has refused to hand over any more documents to Treasury for scrutiny. Read more: http://www.news.com.au/features/federal-election/coalition-to-miss-treasury-deadline-on-campaign-costings/story-e6frfllr-1225904750492#ixzz0wSyNvl5r The Coalition campaign has said the leak "put a cloud" over the integrity of Treasury's analysis and they will use a private firm instead, with costings by Wednesday. Yesterday the Coalition campaign spokesman Andrew Robb confirmed the Australian Federal Police had been asked to investigate.  An AFP spokeswoman has said police are assessing the complaint before deciding whether to investigate. Mr Swan has taunted the Coalition for ignoring the deadline and called the leak probe a diversion.  "Time's up.  What this is all about is the Liberals never, ever intended to submit their spending commitments.  The fact is their numbers don't add up," he said on ABC radio this morning. But at a later press conference, he admitted that announcements made by Prime Minister Julia Gillard at Monday's big set-piece in Brisbane "may be or may not be costed". Read more: http://www.news.com.au/features/federal-election/coalition-to-miss-treasury-deadline-on-campaign-costings/story-e6frfllr-1225904750492#ixzz0wSySQLzW