Tuesday, December 25, 2018

Australia, we need to talk... [Apologies to Waleed Aly]

The results of the 2013 election need to be explained:
How could the Liberal/National Party win when some of its major policies weren't costed, as required by it's own legislation? Especially as each policy by itself had previously helped them to decisively lose an election.
How did not just one, but three, major policies of the Liberal-National Coalition (LNP) not get costed by the PBO (Parliamentary Budget Office) under the rules of Howard's "Charter of Budget Honesty".

It gets worse, there have since been two independent audits into the operations of the PBO, and the failure to cost all major party policies before and after the 2013 election is ignored.

These three policies were worth $1B- $10B / year each:
  • Border Protection (including we discovered later, "boat turn-backs" and extra patrols)
  • Direct Action - an abandoned plan to pay major polluters for their carbon emissions. 
  • NBN, National Broadband Network.