Into the red as we enter the home stretch
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The Coalition has now chewed up all its savings, including yesterday’s round of savings taken from Labor, and is nearly half a billion dollars into the red, as we close in on the last week of the campaign. Meantime, Labor is over $2 billion in the red on its commitments, despite repeatedly insisting it will not add a dollar to the budget deficit during the campaign. The Coalition’s announcement that it was adopting nearly $1.4 billion worth of savings previously announced by Labor, including one initiative attacked by Joe Hockey, briefly restored it to balance between its announced savings and its election commitments. However, another $320 million worth of promises this morning on education has sent the Coalition out to a net cost of $450 million for its $23.9 billion worth of promises. Labor has continued its practice of insisting that all of its promises will be offset by savings, but it is currently nearly $2.2 billion in the red from its much smaller slate of $12 billion worth of promises.
Both sides are starting to get ragged in their costings work as the exhausting campaign takes its toll. Andrew Robb took responsibility for a Coalition costings document riddled with typos and mistakes earlier in the week, although he tried to blame the ALP for not making clear what was new spending and what had been announced in the Budget, a claim for which he was pulled up sharply by a journalist at his broadband press conference on Tuesday. Coalition policy announcements have now — correctly — stopped saying that promises are offset by previous savings initiatives, but do not say how they will be funded. Labor put out a policy announcement today with no mention of funding at all. And both sides are making grand announcements for spending beyond the Forward Estimates period of the next four years. Anthony Albanese boasted of Labor’s commitment to build the inland rail route (Labor over the past week has claimed it is the only party that can be trusted to build the inland rail route and not build the Goodna Bypass), which will be nearly $5 billion wasted on a colossal white elephant, but not until 2014-15. The Princes Highway duplication ($250 million) and the Parramatta-Epping rail link ($2.1 billion) are all off in the distant future, politically speaking. And the bulk of the Liberals’ broadband spending is beyond the Forward Estimates period, as is its promise to build the Mackay Ring Road and, like Labor, the Moreton Bank rail link. This week also saw the second actual costing blowout. The first wasn’t particularly serious — the Liberals appear to have made a $500 million error in the fourth year of its costings for 2800 new hospital beds, but $500 million in the health budget is neither here nor there. But Tony Abbott’s confirmation yesterday of the Coalition’s June promise to index the Defence Force Retirement and Death Benefits Scheme has allowed Labor to point out, and Andrew Robb to more or less admit, that it will cost far more than the $98 million allocated to it over Forward Estimates and the $100 million Robb says will be put into the Future Fund to cover out-years, with talk of an $8 billion cost over an extended period. With seven days to go, there’ll be plenty of red ink splashed around before polling day. ***
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26 Comments
No wonder the policy costings from both sides are not going to be submitted before the deadline
The Morgan Poll 57.5-47.5 to Labor result has been dismissed as rogue but perhaps a little too hastily. While those figures may over-state the Labor vote there is a possibility that Gillard is heading for a smashing win.
The major reason for that is Gillard herself. She has modelled her political persona as a feminine version of Bob Hawke and she has done it very well. The humour and charm, the Aussie exuberance, the easy-going approachability etc are all there in a similar way to Hawke, while leaving out some of the rough bits that people weren’t so keen on. Even the emphasis on traditional Cabinet government is a reference to Hawke’s style.
She has also been able to inject a strong note of feminine, caring concern - witness her things-are-getting- a-bit-harder-every-year speech today. This is a key aspect that Hawke could not do.
When she is elected (I don’t have any doubt) we will see a government with policy settings only a little to the right of Rudd but with a much more populist touch and with a strong marketing edge that has a much less machine-like quality than with what we saw with Rudd.
It could be very hard to defeat over this decade.
@ David ALP Sanderson
Before you get too excited the poll was done on Saturday face to face with some on Sunday morning BEFORE Rudd gave Gillard the cold shoulder at their map meeting.
Sorry - Lib 42.5.
Wow.
We have election campaign marginal seat vote-buying on a scale never before so large and so blatant.
The Maxine Railway at over $2 billion or $400 million a marginal electorate and predictably nary a peep outa the normally indignant Keane…….
Who woulda thunk it?
Labor electioneering nationally on the taxpayers dime.
Politics is as local as the price is national
The fact the poll was last weekend is only a plus for Labor. This week has obviously gone very poorly for Abbott and very well generally for Gillard (although she should not have let Keneally get too close and the rail link was met with more scepticism than she might have expected).
As I have said before her performance on Q and A was a masterpiece of political communication, and when she performs at that level in future she is going to be very hard to defeat.
@ David Sanderson
Gillard will win by 10 seats. Unless we get another damaging leak in the next 7 days.
I am surprised the media has not taken her to tak on the Emerson affair in the Womens Weekly
The Emerson affair! You are such a troglodyte.
Demosntrate poor judgement by a Deputy PM and a Minster of the Crown
Surely you cant defend her
No wonder we didnt get grocery watch or fuel watch, he could have been blackmailed.
Same issues as ex Police Minister in NSW - Campbell.
Who should I award points to? The chicken or the gull?
Be honest - does anybody really believe the costings by either party. Even if, by some freak of nature, either party managed to be accurate they will usually make adjustments to policy once in power. It’s responsible to have costings but, paradoxically, it’s also a waste of time and effort.
@ Robertson
I am loath to take the bait on the subject of the Emerson affair but you are trawling over very stale news. Gillard discussed this matter in her interview with ABC’s Australian Story way back in 2006. Forget ‘Women’s Weekly’ with its four year old ‘scoop’. Gillard was smart, she’d aired her own skeleton in the cupboard long before ‘Women’s Weekly’ even knew who she was.
If people want to stop the marginal seat porkbarrelling there’s a fairly obvious solution:
Proportional representation
Australia as one big electorate.
You guys/gals can froth all you like but Labor is home. Moving forward is a totally banal slogan but comparatively it appears to be on the money.
Often the claim is that with PR you lose local representatation or have to have multimember electorates. This need not be so.
For example, lets say that we decided that Australia needed 150 Federal politicians. Everyone votes and lets say that 10% vote Green, 43% vote ALP 43% vote coalition and 4% vote others/informal. We say that you need at least 5% to have a representative and we use PR to distribute those under the bar.
Let’s say that results in 44.5% ALP 44.5% Coalition and 10.5% Green. That means that the majors get about 66 each and the Greens get about 18 depneding on preference flows. The divisions are ranked by vote and those with the strongest votes for each party return that party’s candidate until each has their required number of seats. So the candidate is local and we still only have 150 of them to support.
No more porkbarrelling and we still get locals.
The dogs bark but the caravan is moving forward. I like it.
[does anybody really believe the costings by either party] Things change from day to day, nothing is written in stone!. You need to have a crystal ball before you can guarantee you will get the costings correct!.
I still cannot understand why people rubbish face to face polls, are people saying they will tell porkies to the person sitting in front of you?.
I was particulary impressed by her feminine, caring concern for asylum seekers, and he feminine, caring proposal to put them in a processing centre in East Timor.
What’s the point in expressing her caring feminine concern if she’s just going to get smacked down by the less caring xenophobes?
FRAN BARLOW: I dare say both forms of voting have their proponents. There is one thing going for our present system.
When I looked at the huge list of candidates for the Senate, I’m talking voting below the line, at least most of them are so bad they will A) Not get their money back B) the chances of any of them being elected-the DLP, The religious lot, the people campaigning against the recognition of global warming, the sporting shooters, Steve Fielding’s mob, and all the other mentally challenged lunatics-are so remote that as long as you get numbers in sequence, you can put them in any order!
A joke in poor taste, which suits my anti-pollie push at the moment
I’ve just read David Marr’s Born to Run article in the SMH and I’d like to register my protest against his pretentious and condescending arrogance. His horribly smug belief that he can see through the drives, motivations and beliefs of whoever happens to be standing before him is totally insufferable.
Old school journalists would never have allowed this kind of preening self-promotion into the newspaper. And they were right.
The only thing that worries me in the SMH is Peter FitzSimons head gear,is no one brave enough to tell him how bad it looks?
Labor is not selling their reply to the attacks on the deficet it has racked up at all well. PM Gillard today on Laurie Oakes made the point of comparing out debt in world terms impressively by using a sinmple analogy of the debit card. This needs to be said time and time again because people are frightened of labours great big debt and need to see it is small debt on theide scale time and time again to stop people being terrified
BERNARD KEANE - Your headline about “as we enter the home stretch” makes me wonder: did you happen to watch Lateline on Thursday night and the Jay Rosen interview about “horse race journalism”
A good article about campaign costing which uses a well known analogy for a title and we get a screed from Powerlite about poor journalism, cut and pasted from Lateline?
So Bernard, stop informing us with facts mate, it’s obviously confusing Powerlite who goes into a gallop if he/she sees even the slightest reference to horse racing.
It’s a long stretch, but hey, easy for Powerlite.
CHRISTOPHER DUNNE, with friends like you the ALP doesn’t even need enemies. Keep it going with the personal attacks. Even though you’re attempting to insult a syllogism not a person - it’s about as personal as expressing your dislike of a colour of tie or a letter of the alphabet. But don’t let that discourage you, I think you’re really eloquent and you should become an ALP speechwriter.
BERNARD KEANE, the emphasis on campaign promises from both sides, costings, “budget black holes” and so on, just encourages both parties to campaign in this shallow way, and to lock themselves in to pork barrels. In effect, you’re pressuring the parties to write their whole budgets for next year without even a fraction of the information they will need to do so properly.
What you should be doing is interviewing economists, experts on medical administration, criminologists, scientists and so on, finding out from them what issues Australia needs to deal with, and then putting those questions to politicians and printing their answers.
Oh but I keep forgetting, interviewing people is all passe in the media now isn’t it - unless you count interviewing yourselves, which the press seem to have no inhibitions with.
POWERSWITCH: As the only nation on the planet to have a public holiday for a horse race, a horsey comment is most apposite.
I disagree with Jay Rosen, within the framework of seldom do I find American political comment as being germain (sic) to Australian political comment.