Labor’s costing announcement an unforced error less than a week from election

OPINION: Logic and politics sometimes just can’t get together. That’s hardly a surprise to many political observers, but one party, just one week out from the election, has provided a staggering example.

THINGS happen during election campaigns which defy logic, especially those that have obviously been long planned but have so much downside attached to them you can only wonder if the thought process was out to lunch when the scheduling covered the particular event.

Labor’s costings announcement on Sunday is such an unforced error.

When campaign directors and the leader’s office plan an election they have a giant white board which has the allocated numbers of days — normally about 33, but this time it’s nearly 60 because someone has a truly wicked sense of humour.

One of those days for national elections is to release the “costings” which is a set of numbers going up and down in columns called spending and saving.

It’s tricky in times of deficits and debt — such as we have now — because you can’t talk of what John Howard liked to refer to as sunlit uplands but rather predict you’re going to get out of the muck quicker than the other lot and you can add up.

What you don’t want to happen is that you have a black hole — not the Stephen Hawking type but a budget one into which all political and economic credibility can disappear.

Labor managed to avoid that but that’s all. They have a financial outlook which shows they will have deficits that exceed those predicted by the Coalition by some $16.5 billion over four years. This is scary for voters who are worried about debt and deficit and that’s most of them.

However, the real nasty bit of Labor’s costings document is how they get to this less than satisfactory position.

In large part, they do it by banking $4.9 billion in Coalition savings on superannuation and cuts to the public sector.

Bill Shorten and his senior spokesmen and women can’t say how they get to this position and they also shamelessly admit they will not restore the “brutal and cruel” cuts to health spending they have campaigned against for more than two years.

The $1.9 billion efficiency dividend in the Coalition’s Budget is also in Labor’s savings column but there is no indication where this money will come from — what services might be cut or if jobs might be lost.

Why Labor would want to shine a light on what is at best a confused set of financial and budgetary projections in the last week of a campaign has economic management at its heart defies logic.

This is especially the case when all this has been known since May 3 when Scott Morrison delivered the Budget and Malcolm Turnbull kicked off the election.

Logic and politics sometimes just can’t get together.

Don’t miss Dennis Atkins and Malcolm Farr’s election podcast Two Grumpy Hacks, available for free on iTunes or Soundcloud.

Originally published as Labor’s costing announcement an unforced error less than a week from election