A closer look at the Coalition’s economic promises
The Coalition costings arrived at the last minute… and it was quickly obvious why.
Weirdly for a party that has been criticising the ALP for being big spending, and putting pressure on inflation, the coalition announced that both 2025-26 and 2-26-27 would have bigger budget deficits.
They countered this by forecasting smaller deficits in the final two years of the forward estimates – but one of those year will be after the next election so it is less a forecast and more some numbers that no one thinks there is any hope of being accurate.
So where are the big “savings”? They estimate they will save $17.2bn over 4 years from cutting 41,000 public servants from Canberra.
Apparently, this will not involve cuts or voluntary redundancies or frontline staff or anyone from Defence or security agencies. As Jack Thrower noted, given in December 2024 there were only 69,438 APS jobs in Canberra, once we exclude those areas we are left with 46,293 jobs. So the Coalition costing assumes that nearly 90% of Canberra’s APS will resign over five years. If the Dept of Health counts as frontline, then we’re assuming 99.2% of people quit, and we know the Coalition loves the War Memorial, so if that is also excluded the Coalition is now assuming that over 100% of the remaining public servants will resign.
There was no costing on the nuclear power other than to note it will all be off-budget in a fund, because apparently a nuclear power plant that have no commercial viability will deliver a return on their investment.
The Coalition also promises to raise a tax on electric vehicles, and end the restriction on sales of vapes which they hope means they’ll raise $3.6bn from people smoking.
They also promised to spend $21bn on defence by 2030, these costings go to 2028-29 and only have $12bn, which means I guess that they plan to spend $9bn extra in 2029-20?
Little wonder they released them on Thursday. These costings might “add up” in a spreadsheet, but they revealed a distinct lack of policy acumen.
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