Now that Wayne Swan has set up the Parliamentary Budget Office there is no excuse for an Opposition to not to have detailed costings.
The PBO can do this very easily for any policy position any party has.
The Opposition has no need and nor should it release its costings until the PBO puts it imprimatur on it which would occur AFTER the release of the PEFO.
Wayne Swan has also got the PBO to lok at all parties costings and to release their findings after the election.
Unlike Peter Costello's effort re Charter of budget honesty this has been clearly thought through. The Charter of budget honesty was only an asset to the Government of the day. The Opposition was always at a disadvantage.
Now it is a level playing field because of the PBO.
It will be interesting to see how the opposition responds. They clearly and undeniably lied about their 'costings' in the last election.
We will also see if they recognise the economic circumstances of the day here in Australia. We already have a contractionary budget. With weak nominal GDP growth the last thing needed is a more contractionary budget that at present.
Don't get me wrong - I think the PBO is a great advance. But as someone who's done a lot of policy costing its just not true that they can cost anything "easily".
ReplyDeleteTo do a proper costing of many things you need a good knowledge of the fine detail of the programs - actual or proposed - being costed. With proposed programs, of course, the proposers will often be unwilling to provide that detail ("we are going to incarcerate 643 Sril Lankan asylum seekers at Buchenwald for an average period of 63.53 years, providing the following facilities ..."). You also need quick access to and (much rarer) full understanding of the various administrative datasets you have to use. It's no slur on the people in the PBO to note they won't always have these, so I expect that many of their costings are going to look very different to a "fair dinkum" one done by the responsible Departments.
The PBO has overcome the problem that costings are not always, for various reasons, fair dinkum. But they won't always be accurate, and I foresee future bunfights when it is apparent that they are not. I particularly see bunfights when it is because the policy proposers have specifed grossly unrealistic assumptions to "dress up" the proposal.
Fair point DD. I used the wrong word.
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