Spending is under control and an early surplus is on the way — what could go wrong?

Check out that spending, so restrained! The Australian yesterday:

… Treasurer will hold the line on spending, with the budget forecast to return to surplus a year ahead of schedule, with the figure expected to come in between $2 billion and $3bn in 2019-20. The spending restraint to date has been the greatest achieved since the period of the Hawke government from 1985-86 to 1989-90, when real outlays fell by an average of 0.8 per cent a year.

It gets better. The Daily Telegraph yesterday:

Australia’s budget will return to the black a year earlier than expected as Scott Morrison celebrates his third year as Treasurer by giving immediate tax relief to middle and low-­income earners. He is expected to declare a wafer-thin surplus next year — the first since Wayne Swan plunged the nation deep into the red.

But what about the bigger picture? The Australian, March 4:

Australian governments have added more to their debt over the past five years than almost any other advanced country … The OECD says it should not be assumed that current low interest rates will last. The normalisation of monetary policy could result in a sharp rise in bond yields. Australia’s borrowing requirement in the current financial year is $74bn, with the budget deficit requiring an additional $24bn in borrowing …

Let’s have a closer look at that spending. The Australian Financial Review yesterday:

Spending, as a proportion of GDP, is stuck at around 25 per cent for several years. Revenue-to-GDP, a measure that includes non-tax income such as dividends, has been between 22 and 23 per cent. The gap reveals itself in Australia’s seemingly intractable run of budget deficits, which are funded through government borrowing. There’s a real risk that if the government keeps to its word on the tax-to-GDP cap, the budget will stay in deficit for longer; and debt will continue to grow. The result is that the real burden is being shifted to a future generation.

Peter Costello says things aren’t going to improve until spending falls under 25 per cent, requiring cuts of about $18bn. ABC television’s 7.30 yesterday:

We’ve now had 10 years of deficit: cumulatively that means to cover that we have had to borrow about $370bn. We went from having no net debt to borrowing about $370bn. That money doesn’t go away. It’s going to be there, we’re going to be paying interest on it, until somebody pays it back. The probabilities are we will never get back to where we were (debt-free) — you and I will die before that ­happens.

Meanwhile, life goes on in its self-satirical mode. No comment necessary for this item in The Tele yesterday:

There’s Mr Tickle, Mr Bump, Mr Messy — and now apparently there’s Mr Sexist. Academics have launched an assault on the beloved Mr Men and Little Miss books and concluded that Roger Hargreaves’s simple tales portray the female characters as less powerful. British researcher Madeleine Pownall — who has written entire papers on the importance of slam poetry — spent several months studying the books for signs of sexism. She found, in addition to male characters being given an average of 12 extra words, the Little Miss characters needed to be “saved” more than half the time while the Mr Men characters needed saving only a third of the time. The study claims even the names of some characters, like Little Miss Bossy, might play to gender stereotypes.