THE COALITION made four kinds of mistakes in its costings according to the Treasury; the understandable, the inexcusable, the inexplicable, and those resulting from a failure to comprehend the nature of the process.
Although concealed from the public at the time of the vote, the decision of Andrew Wilkie to go with Labor on the basis of the costings suggests they have come at a price.
The inexcusable: According to Treasury the Coalition counted the interest to be saved on debt from selling Medibank Private, but not the dividends it would lose as a result of the sale. It is a bit like deciding to sell a rental property without noticing you will no longer be able to collect the rent.
Also inexcusable was double-counting savings to be made by increasing the efficiency dividend, effectively double-counting savings already factored into the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme. This means measuring the wrong time period when calculating money to be made from the parental leave levy, and failing to update its savings from abandoning the National Broadband Network to reflect the smaller amount actually spent. All up they are worth $2.7 billion.
The inexplicable: The Coalition announced spending from the Health and Hospitals Fund, the Education Investment Fund, the Building Australia Fund and the Nation Building Fund without apparently checking that there was enough free money in the funds. Treasury and Finance have examined what had already been allocated and found that adding on the Coalition's promises would more than empty the funds, pushing them $3.3 billion into the red. The departments acknowledge that it may be possible to cancel or defer projects to make room for the $3.3 billion but says the Coalition provided no such details.
The nature of the process: The Charter of Budget Honesty sets out guidelines for election costings, in order to make sure they are done on the same basis. One forbids the counting of proceeds from expected ''second-round effects'' such as a saving on the dole from a job creation program. The Coalition counted such an effect because it says the National Centre for Economic Modelling told it its program would take 51,000 people off the dole. (NATSEM said yesterday it had in fact had no communication with the Coalition and would have only worked for it indirectly as part of a contract with the Parliamentary Library.) It is the same with the accounting measure known as the Conservative Bias Allowance. Under the rules, changing it does not change a thing. The Treasury says such an adjustment would not create ''actual budgetary savings''. All up these are worth $3.5 billion.
And the understandable: The Coalition used an interest rate of 5.5 per cent in calculating savings on debt repayments. Treasury says it should have used 4.9 per cent, the same as was used in the pre-election outlook. But Treasury never actually included the figure in the outlook. Without a lot of digging the Coalition would not have found it out.
Unless perhaps it took Treasury into its confidence early, as it might now believe it should have.
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