Terry McCrann says the black hole Labor claims to see in the Coalition costings is dwarfed by real crater in its own finances:
The Government’s claiming ... there’s a $70 billion hole in the Opposition’s budget number.
That’s nothing, Treasury ... has a $97 billion hole in its own budget numbers.
The 2010 PEFO ... projected budget bottom lines for the years 2010-11 through 2013-14 that added up to a total deficit of $43 billion.
The outcomes - assuming of course, Treasury’s latest projection for the current year is reasonably close - is actually $140 billion of deficits.
And that’s when revenue has risen, not fallen.
Janet Albrechtsen says Penny Wong may be nice, but as a Finance Minister she has been a $106 billion disaster:
Starting with that first budget - 2011-12 - when Wong was Finance Minister, she and Labor predicted a budget deficit of $22.6 billion in 2011-12.
She was out by more than $20bn. The most recent budget in May revealed a deficit for 2011-12 of $43.3bn.
It gets worse. In that first budget, Wong predicted a surplus of $3.5bn for 2012-13. She was out by $22.9bn with the actual result being a deficit of $19.4bn.
And, yes, it gets even worse. In that first 2011-12 budget, Wong predicted a surplus of $3.7bn for 2013-14. By July this year, Wong was already out by $33.8bn this time. Her economic statement revealed a deficit of $30.1bn.
Back in 2011-12, Wong promised a surplus of $5.8bn for 2014-15. Now Wong tells us it will be a $24bn deficit, putting her out by another $29.8bn.
Cumulatively that makes Wong the $106 Billion Woman. That’s not an accounting error. That’s record incompetence.
David Uren doesn’t believe the PEFO forecast of Labor’s first surplus in a quarter of a century:
Let’s take a look at PEFO. It continues to run with ludicrously optimistic projections on revenue growth.
Receipts are expected to grow by 22 per cent between 2013-14 and 2016-17, moving the ratio of receipts to GDP from 23.6 per cent to 24.8 per cent over a period of time when growth is at or below trend.
Sounds implausible? It is.
Certainly, Treasury is a tad defensive about the inexplicable drop in the rate of unemployment from 6 1/4 per cent in 2014-15 to 5 per cent in 2015-16 as outlined in the projections.
It’s OK, evidently - the Treasury has done this sort of thing before. Don’t we understand that it is just a projection and the Treasury simply bungs in the trend figures, even if they don’t make any sense?
The document suggests revenue could easily be $30 billion a year less than the budget forecasts, while spending could be rising 50 per cent faster across the next decade than dictated by the government’s budget strategy.
It says there is a 70 per cent chance that nominal gross domestic product growth - which is the value of all goods and services produced - could be as little as 1.75 per cent a year for the next three years against a central forecast of 3.5 per cent.
The pre-election fiscal outlook, or PEFO, also shows there could be a $3.5bn hit to the budget if the Papua New Guinea asylum-seeker solution does not work and it highlights that carbon tax revenue could be vastly different from budget projections.
