Election Wrap - 25 September

I was quoting the numbers in the paper, don’t whine to me about it.

Yep – people who can’t distinguish between capital costs and recurrent costs really shouldn’t be holding political office or making policy … unfortunately people have a tendency to conflate the two all over the place (hence “why are they our spending on that (lowish value one off expense like public artwork, buidling, etc), how many (recurrent high value expenses like doctors and nurses and police) could that pay for?”)

agree with guruJ about the above; tonights abc news had a lot of detail about these figures (they come from treasury)… the gist of it was labor had small surpluses and libs big deficiets; zed disagreed with this analysis but either didn’t put up his own costings or the journo elected not to inform the audience of him doing it. (oh how i wish we had media which didn’t leave me wondering about these things)

johnboy, you’re reporting the wrong figures for “Spending”.

The true figures according to that ABC article are:

Labor
Recurrent … $166m
Capital … $318m
TOTAL … $484m

Liberals
Recurrent … $224m
Capital … $171m
TOTAL … $395m

That extra $58m of recurrent spending by the Liberals is a lot more significant than the capital expenditure, by the way. That indicates an ongoing drag on the ACT’s financial position year-in, year-out, whereas capital spending is a once-off.

And since recurrent spending tends to grow over time (particularly for things like stamp duty cuts which will exponentially increase revenue foregone as house prices continue to rise), pledges in this area need to be monitored much more closely.

Mary Porter’s been fostering the grey vote, retirement village thing for a while. And at a recent meeting told us all that having Vicki Dunne show up to functions when Zed’s expected is actually quite good for her (Mary) because the way Vicki comes across in meetings is very good for the Labor vote.

“It seems the grey vote is the new Gungahlin.”

Well that just aint good enough is it?? Gonna have to get me a can of whoop-ass…

Actually issue 109 of Gungahlin Smokesignals should be getting delivered next week, so let’s see if that reminds them all we’re out there. 😉

PS: Zed, you’ve been saying a lot about your opponents’ position on our aquatic complex, but haven’t offered anything up yourself that we’ve seen as yet. You can trump them by simply saying:

“Yes construction will commence within the 2009-10 fiscal year. Yes it will have a 50m, 25m, and toddlers pools, plus gym, as per the current master plans. No we won’t give the whole joint over to private interests on a long-term lease thereby locking us into potentially crappy service with nothing that can be done about it. Plus we will not compromise the development of the whole college precinct by letting the LDA sell off a chunk of the land for a commercial development. We realise that the site is already extremely constrained for what is planned to fit on it, so we’ll ensure the whole site is maintained for community facilities not private developments.”

Cut that out, paste it onto your letterhead, instant policy.

imarty said :

Anybody else see Norvan sitting on Adelaide Ave (near the windmill art installation thingy) yesterday just before 5pm in a deck chair surrounded by his signs?

nope. too busy being hypnotised by the windmill art installation thingy.

Anybody else see Norvan sitting on Adelaide Ave (near the windmill art installation thingy) yesterday just before 5pm in a deck chair surrounded by his signs?

CAP:

Roger Nicoll is suggesting that our health woes can be solved by “a community-driven health approach”.

what like “bring out your dead!”??

Despite leading the way in election promises, Liberal shadow treasurer Brendan Smyth said his party remained committed to promising less than Labor, ”and we will deliver stronger surpluses”.

This is a perfect illustration of the ideological retardation of the Liberal Party. Their platform commitment to ‘small Government’ extends only to being ‘a little bit smaller than the ALP….hopefully’.