Tag Archives: cooking the books

Rudd’s Smoke And Mirrors Accounting

26 May

Media Release – Senator Barnaby Joyce, 26 May 2010:

Questioning in Senate Estimates today showed that the Labor Party has been cooking the books to make their spending plans look better.

In the budget the Labor Party brought forward about $1.5 billion, which was earmarked for spending in future years for State and Local Governments, to this financial year.

“Much of this will be paid on June 7. It is not clear what State and Local governments will do with the money for the 23 days that will be left in this financial year. Perhaps the interest will help their bottom line at the expense of the Commonwealth’s”, Senator Barnaby Joyce said.

“The Government could not provide a cogent reason for bringing forward this spending. They could not produce one letter from a local government requesting an early transfer of spending.”

“Labor has produced an accounting trick to increase the base of their funding in 2009-10 and therefore make the amount they can spend higher under the 2% expenditure cap in forward years.”

“The Government’s financial acumen is demonstrated by them losing $11 million on the Sydney West Metro project. In last year’s budget the Government gave NSW $91 million for this project. Not much more than six months later the NSW government scrapped the project, with $11 million of the Commonwealth’s contribution going west on helpful things like ‘consultant fees’.”

“This is another clear example that the Australian people simply cannot trust this Labor Government to deliver economic responsibility.”

More Information- Jenny Swan 0746 251500

This government is constantly ‘cooking the books’.

Please take the time to review the following exposés of other accounting ‘tricks’, in previous Rudd government budgets –

Labor: Hide The Increase

Labor Fakes GDP By 4.5%

Tanner Lies About Budget, GFC

Labor’s $50bn Budget Fraud

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Labor’s $50bn Budget Fraud

13 May

Economist Terry McCrann exposes yet more of the same blatant fiddling the books in this year’s Budget from Labor.  $50 Billion worth of “fiddling”.

From the Herald Sun:

Wayne Swan’s budget is built on two great fiddles. Appropriately, the fiddles relate to the Rudd Government’s two great stupidities – the National Broadband Network and the Emissions Trading Scheme.

The fiddles enable the government to hide up to a massive $50 billion of new spending. So much for the claim they’ve pulled the pursestrings tight.

They also enable the government to ‘keep’ the growth in spending in the 2013-14 year to just 1.9 per cent. Without the fiddles, spending would actually have grown by at least 3.5 per cent in that year – shattering the government’s 2 per cent ceiling.

Now yes, the government’s second great stupidity, the ETS, has been ‘deferred’, while the first marches on…

Ditching the ETS enables the government to take up to $30 billion of proposed spending on it out of the budget and replace it – or most of it – by new spending. With, in an exercise of fiscal magic, no increase in the total spending number!

While separately the $26 billion-going-on-$43 billion to be spent on the NBN is just ‘disappeared’ almost completely from the budget! …

So, put the two together – the ditching of the ETS and the “no formal response” to the NBN – and the government has quite probably hidden as much as $50 billion of very real new spending out to 2013-14.

And blown its 2 per cent growth target right out of the very dirty fiscal water.

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Labor Fakes GDP By 4.5%

17 Mar

*This post follows on from my recent article, “Labor: Hide The Increase”.  There, I showed that the Rudd Government has fiddled the books to hide their massive increase in borrowing and spending. Please read the article for background to this new article.

In the fine print on the Rudd Government’s Budget 2009-10 MYEFO website, we learned that Rudd Labor made a change in the accounting method that was previously used to calculate Gross Domestic Product (GDP).  This change resulted in a “substantial increase” to the official GDP figures:

* The 2008-09 Annual National Accounts show a substantial increase in the level of GDP over history due to the ABS adopting the new System of National Accounts 2008. Given the degree of increase in the level of nominal GDP, the Government has released updated tables of fiscal aggregates contained within Appendix D of the 2009-10 MYEFO.

So just how much is that “substantial increase”?

4.5%. Or $47bn. In just one year.

Here’s a chart I’ve put together from the official Australian Government Budget data. It shows my reverse calculation* of the value (in $millions) of Rudd Labor’s “revisions” to historic GDP.

That is, it shows just how much the Rudd government has simply tacked on to the previously-reported official GDP figures (click to enlarge):

Rudd Labor "revisions" to past GDP figures

This chart only goes up to 2006-07.  The last year of a Coalition government Budget report.

That is because the Rudd government has gone back and “revised” the figures in the Rudd Labor 2007-08 and 2008-09 Final Budget Outcome documents too.  So I could not find the original reported figures for those years in order to calculate the GDP, and compare to their newly “revised” figures.

Even so, you can easily see that Rudd Labor’s “revisions” to past GDP are indeed, a “substantial increase”.  For the 2006-07 year – the last year that I am able to compare original vs “revised” figures – it appears that they have adjusted GDP upwards by $47 billion (4.49%) over the original figures reported by the Howard Government.

Of course, we can easily perceive just why Rudd Labor would wish to do this….

Continue reading ‘Labor Fakes GDP By 4.5%’

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