THE budget black hole is less alarming than Barry O'Farrell would have voters believe.
The deterioration in the budget outlook will certainly make it more difficult for the new Premier to finance his election promises and deliver budget surpluses. But when you compare the $4.5 billion black hole between now and mid-2015, with what O'Farrell's government will spend in that period, it looks a bit more like a pothole. That $4.5 billion is less than 2 per cent of the $248 billion that NSW can be expected to spend on its activities over the next four years.
Financial markets were not too fazed by O'Farrell's warning. Market analysts said the new budget figures were unlikely to even cause a review of the state's premium AAA credit rating.
Analysis by Michael Turner, from RBC Capital Markets, suggests the predicted growth in NSW financial liabilities would not be enough to trigger a credit rating review, even if O'Farrell did nothing to plug the budget hole he has found.
More than half the black hole was found in the preliminary, unpublished estimates for the financial year 2014-15. Forecasts that far off ''are inherently unreliable'', Turner said.
If O'Farrell had used conventional government budgeting norms and considered only Treasury's official forward estimate period up to 2013-14, his black hole would have shrunk to $2.1 billion.
The headlines after his budget announcement probably left many voters believing NSW faces a deficit of $4.5 billion. In fact, the black hole is the estimated variation from cumulative budget surpluses projected until 2013-14 added to the unpublished estimated deficit for 2014-15.
The cumulative total of deficits over the new forward estimates comes to just under $1.6 billion.
The figures actually show the O'Farrell government will start off with bigger budget surpluses than forecast last December for this financial year and next.
An extra $226 million is now forecast in those two years.
Nevertheless, NSW voters can expect to hear about the budget black hole for a long time yet. The mother of all black holes - the $10 billion one revealed by Peter Costello when he became federal treasurer in 1996 - was an integral part of the Howard government's political rhetoric for more than a decade. Hansard shows the shadow treasurer, Joe Hockey, was still telling Parliament about the ''Beazley black hole'' in 2008, more than 12 years after it was unearthed.