Saturday 28 April 2012

The luck of winning elections at the right or wrong time

Peter Brent in his Mumble blog has a great post called Deserve’s got nothing to do with it. In it he has graphs showing the budget balances from 2000–1 to 2009–10 for three countries: Australia, Canada and New Zealand. Basically all three had budgets were in surplus until the GFC hit and then all three went into deficit, and are sill in deficit.

He then looks at when their current Government was elected and how it's doing in the polls. It seems that in terms of timing, the current Australian Government was very unlucky. To quote from the blog:
No matter which country you pick in these graphs, the fiscal year in which you would least want to take government is 2007–8, the last pre-GFC one. Then the first budget you put together yourself is the 2008–9 one.

In each of those countries the government’s well-laid plans for 2008–9 were blown to smithereens and the bar dropped deeply into the red.

You can argue ‘til the cows come home about waste and too much spending and how many jobs were saved and at how much per job.

But no Australian government would have avoided going into deficit to the tune of tens of billions of dollars from 2008–9.

In political terms, $20 billion wouldn’t be much different to $50 billion. Either would have provided the ammunition Tony Abbott and team have been so adept at using. (Barnaby Joyce is especially talented with the metaphor.)

Throw in this politically-challenged government and it just gets better.

A perfect storm.

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