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!?
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Swan Hits Out At Coalition Over Costings. (Read 1405 times)
