ACT Budget 1 week old and already out of date

Very concise and accurate, Sleaz274.

So we have ten separate governments replicating essentially the same work in one country? I guess that makes us pretty special. Zimbabwe can’t even keep control of one government, and here we are managing ten of the things! Sure, we’re not managing them very well, but to manage ten separate and almost entirely independent jurisdictional governments with overlapping constituents is quite a feat. Completely useless, but impressive nonetheless…

Most states I believe hand down their budgets before the federal budget for simplicity sake and due to timing issues in actually passing an appropriation bill. To include the thousands of variations in expenditure and forecasts released in the Federal budget would simply be too big a task to include. The commonwealth doesn’t provide notice of its projections to the states simply because they are constantly updated during the budget cycle and the states do not have access to the figures and models the commonwealth does.

If it is not evident to everyone in the world right now that straight line macro economic modelling is less accurate than astrology then may I suggest you go away and read last year’s Budget projections to see how far they were off. These are revenue projections and are not cash in the bank losses.

Of course once the ACT Government rolls it millions in unspent projects as it continues to try and set new records every year in capital expenditure while never actually achieving the total spend this loss will most likely be absorbed until you all start buying new tvs again.

Katy’s involved, are you seriously surprised that there’s been a bungle?

This is why virtually everyone else WAITS for the federal budget….

I don’t think the ACT budget needs to be necessarily be handed down after the Federal one, but they should be getting an inside line from the Federal Treasury on what the GST revenues are likely to look like.

So you can blame the inevitable pain on someone else?

Katy Gallagher is out of date.

In all the media gumf about 20 years of ACT govt, Jack Waterford counted Katy G as one of the Assemblies real Bovver Boys. In company with Bernard Collaery and a couple of others. I was fascinated. But kind of pleased in a ‘go girl’ kinda way.

I suspect she did it so as to be able to say ‘we really didn’t want to inflict budget pain, but Fed cuts drove us to it.’

um, act government + act public service.

enough said.

they never seem to get anything right first go.