Slices of ‘magic pudding’ revenue running out

Letter reveals is the incoherence of the LNP’s “magic pudding” view of government revenue and spending

Federal Government representative for the 2032 bid Ted O'Brien speaks to the media during a press conference at Parliament House in Canberra. (AAP Image/Lukas Coch)

REGARDING Ted O’Brien’s letter “Federal funding flows” (Daily, August 16) with a large picture of Ted as active man, coat off, heroically gazing into the future.

What Ted’s letter reveals is the incoherence of the LNP’s “magic pudding” view of government revenue and spending. That is that revenues can be slashed but spending magically can keep rising while revenues fall.

Ted and the LNP have “one big idea”. They plan by 2024 to slash $147 billion from federal revenues. Most of this will go to giant tax cuts for high income earners like Ted. Yet Ted keeps spruiking how much the LNP is spending on infrastructure and mens’ sheds. The LNP really is promising, magic pudding style, that the huge tax cuts will cause the economy to grow so dramatically that tax revenues will increase. And pigs will fly in massed formations.

Yet for all Ted’s boasting about “record” spends (and as the population grows spending has to increase) the record seems clear that the LNP since 2013 has let infrastructure spending slide as a percentage of GDP. He does’t mention that. Ted and the LNP boast about a $100 billion spend on infrastructure but this is spread over 10 years. That’s just $10 billion a year. Ted and the LNP spend $6 billion a year in franking credit handouts, and spend $8 billion a year in private health insurance subsidies. Ted somehow neglected to mention these spending figures in his letter. Or the obscene amounts his government pumps each year into subsidising private schools. This is money which would be more usefully spent on infrastructure and job creation rather than middle class welfare.

Ted and the LNP claim to be for spending and cutting revenues at the same time. Maybe they do have a magic pudding that grows and grows no matter how many slices are cut out. Or maybe they are just talking nonsense.

CLIVE NEWTON, Nambour

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