It’s not unreasonable to claim that the Coalition isn’t making any savings worth mentioning despite the many billions claimed - their “savings” mostly are immediately spent again and thus don’t save anything. In fiscal terms, rather than promising to be the ideological demons conjured by Kevin Rudd, the Liberal Party is offering itself as Tweedle Dum to Labor’s Tweedle Dee.

That’s mainly good news in the short term. It could indicate that the Coalition understands that trying to slash the deficit this year would be bad and dangerous policy, that the budget updated by Chris Bowen a month ago is basically sound, that the economy needs that budget’s $30 billion or so of deficit stimulus and is likely to still require a light touch in 2014-15. The wild world willing, we could be on track to handle renewed discipline in those projection years, or so we hope.

And that’s the bad news - there’s no sign that Abbott/Hockey won’t be as populist and fiscally hopeless as the final Howard/Costello administration. Oh, it was a grand old party over those final three years, the punch spiked twice over, but everyone’s forgotten that it was forcing the Reserve Bank to hit the brakes so hard we were heading for a recession, saved only by the GFC giving us a soft landing.

The challenge this time is different, but it also requires honesty that has been seriously lacking on both sides of the game. Australian governments really can’t keep promising to give people more and tax them less. The longer the pain of our looming demographic challenge is postponed, the much worse it will soon enough be.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/business/the-economy/hockey-closes-campaign-with-a-joke-20130905-2t7ab.html#ixzz2e0gcXheH


Not to discount that Labor saved our skin against the GFC... but the Howard/Costello clowning beforehand was quite atrocious...

... And  of course one of the "savings" in the coalition rubbish calculations is to "delay the implementation" of the Murray Darling Basin program which to say the least was a fantastic masterpiece of hard-won compromises. To delay this, will actually COST MORE MONEY, ENVIRONMENTALLY AND TO THE FARMERS... But fear not, the Libs (hypocritical CONservatives)'s friends, the NATS (hypocritical CONservatives country folks) have already paved the way to give their bush mates more than ONE BILLION dollars of "incentives" on the side...

 

It would be funny if it wasn’t so serious.

After three years of wailing and moaning about waste and budget emergencies and crises and Armageddon, the Liberal party today released its “costings”. And what is the upshot of all their attacks on waste and mismanagement? Well, they predict their budget bottom line will be $6bn better off over the forward estimates (i.e. over four years).

Six billion dollars over four years. Or, given the total revenue over that time will be about $1,657bn, that’s about 0.36% of the budget over those years. Not a lot of room for error.

But they were about attacking waste. There was oodles of it, don’t you know. So how did they end up $6bn better off?

Well, today Joe Hockey and Andrew Robb, in a laughable 22-minute press conference, announced they will be cutting the growth of the foreign aid budget by $4.5bn, rephasing the water buyback scheme from over four years to over six years (a saving of $650m over four years) and a further 0.25% efficiency dividend for the public service to get $428m.

Those three measures account for 92% of the improvement of the Liberal party’s budget bottom line.

Talk about taking the tough choices. Cutting the growth in foreign aid. Who knew that was the biggest waste in government spending!

http://www.theguardian.com/business/grogonomics/2013/sep/05/coalition-costings-political-fluff

 

But BEWARE...!!!

THESE CLOWNS ARE HIDING THE WAY THEY ARE GOING TO FORCE WORKERS ONTO WORK CHOICES CONTRACTS (BY ANY OTHER NAME) THAT WILL REMOVE ENTITLEMENTS AND RIGHTS SO THEIR BUSINESS MATES CAN ENJOY BIGGER PROFITS...  WHILE YOU LOOSE YOUR PANTS...

 

Both the Coalition’s and the ALP’s proposals stack up poorly against population policies (non-existent) and federal funding for childcare, which is inadequate.

Tony Abbott has even waved the White Australia flag by saying that he wants to encourage high income earning women ‒ “women of calibre” ‒ to have more babies.  This is not acceptable in 2013.

Nor is the fact that no scheme guarantees a woman her job back when she returns to work after PPL.

Then there’s the double-dipping of both employers’ and the Federal Government’s schemes, also permitted under existing ALP rules. The Coalition will allow people in the private sector to continue to double-dip.  If the same provisions were to apply to all employers, payments forgone in the private sector by making its staff also choose one scheme over the other, should be gathered up for the federal Treasury coffers.

The bottom line here is that rather than arguing about the unclear details or costs of inadequate policies, all three political parties should go back to the drawing board and try again.

Sarah Brasch has experience with Federal Government financing and has worked on new policy proposals and their costings.  She is also the National Convenor of Women for an Australian Republic and a fairly inactive member of The Greens.  She has spent the last couple of weeks taking a close look at the three Paid Parental Leave policies for Women’s Electoral Lobby.

For more on the Coalition’s costings, finally released today, read Greg Jericho’s analysis in Guardian Australia here.

http://www.independentaustralia.net/2013/politics/the-coalitions-paid-parental-leave-black-hole/