Why did he really do it? Well it wasn't (as you might think) to make a clean breast of the mining tax finances.
(And by the way, as I foreshadowed, it will make a motza)
It was because 10 days after writs are issued for the election the Treasury and Finance will release the Pre-election Economic and Fiscal Outlook - PEFO.
Frighteningly - for any Treasurer, Prime Minister and Finance Minister - it does this independently of them, one of the rare times the bureaucracy can say what it thinks, without consulting its political masters and receiving direction. (The other is the costing of policies)
The previous government got around this by releasing its mid-year economic and fiscal outlook, MEF0, a couple of months early just before the issue of writs so that when PEFO came out it would not be surprised.
It could involve itself in the discussions leading up to MYEFO and so fully understand what it would be getting in PEFO.
Swan couldn't do that - this election will be in winter not summer, so he came up with ECONOMIC STATEMENT JULY 2010.
I reckon that's why.
(The same logic applies to costing policies. You can bet Treasury and Finance will have costed all their election policy announcements before the election is called so they are not surprised by what is independent costing finds - the opposition has no such advantage. For it the prospect of a Finance/Treasury independent costing during the campaign is frightening, with the "blunder" headlines that will result if it comes up with a different answer to their's - which is why in the last election Rudd and Swan's tax policy was a carbon copy of the Coalition's which had already been costed by Treasury.)
Economic Statement July 2010
ANZ ANZ Australian Federal Budget Update 2010-11
Commsec Economic Statement July 2010
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3 comments:
Glad Craig James is not an equity analyst
Would you take a company’s forecasts at face value without even knowing their assumptions? Why would you take the Govt’s?
Only a 10 bil deficit in 2011-2012? I'm expecting to see a surplus in that year now.
As someone who's done an awful lot of them, I'd defend the quality of public service costings and projections against "independent" ones anyday.
Apart from the much higher level of technical expertise in the very specialised subject matter that PS specialists can acquire, and the much better access to good unpublished data (yes I know it should be published but it often isn't), commissioned costings and projections by consultants are NEVER independent - consultants have very strong incentives to tell their client what they want to hear.
It's certainly not unknown for Ministerial advisers to pressure Departments to "adjust" these things (Keating's office, BTW, was the worst I've known for this), but it is unusual, though unfortunately not completely unknown, for Departments to bow to that pressure.
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