Turnbull Government barely keeping its fiscal head above water?

The 2015‑16 Final Budget Outcome document was released on Friday 30 September 2016 by Australian Treasurer Scott Morrison and the Minister for Finance Mathias Cormann. It can be downloaded here.

This is Stephen Koukoulas writing on the subject in The Guardian on 3 October 2016:

The treasurer, Scott Morrison, and the finance minister, Mathias Cormann, "took out the garbage" last Friday afternoon, dumping the final budget outcome for 2015-16 on the Treasury website under the cover of the football grand finals, a long weekend and the start of school holidays around much of the country.

Morrison and Cormann came close to breaching the Charter of Budget Honesty, which requires the release of each budget outcome for the prior financial year by 30 September each year. They made it with a few hours to spare.

They also released it without a press conference or detailed media release, making sure there was miniscule coverage of something that would normally be a key area of economic and fiscal management. This is especially the case with "budget repair", the "return to surplus", "paying off debt" and dealing with the "budget emergency" being the basis that saw the Coalition elected to power in both September 2013 and July 2016.

Looking at the budget outcome document, it is clear why it was released in the shadows of the Friday night without any fanfare.

The 2015-16 budget deficit was $39.6bn or 2.4% of gross domestic product. When the former treasurer Joe Hockey delivered the first budget of the Coalition government in May 2014, the budget deficit for 2015-16 was forecast to be $17.1bn.

Much of the blowout was due to decisions of the Coalition government. Foregoing revenue from the carbon price, gifting $8.8bn to the RBA and ramping up spending on border protection without any offsets were vital.

The Coalition, contrary to all perceptions, has been spending at an alarming rate. In 2012-13, the last full year of the previous Labor government, the ratio of government spending to GDP was 24.1%. In 2014-15, this had risen to 25.6% and, in 2015-16, it rose to 25.7% of GDP. The 1.6% of GDP blowout in spending between 2012-13 and 2015-16 is about $26bn and accounts for more than the blowout in the deficit from the time of the 2014 budget.

The deficit blowout fed into the level of government debt as it had to ramp up its borrowing to cover the ever growing shortfall.

Net government debt rose to $296.4bn at June 2016, up from $153bn in June 2013 just before the Coalition took power. As a share of GDP, net government debt has risen from 10% to 18%, just off the all-time high in the wake of the second world war. When the 2016 Myefo is released before year end, net government debt will be at a 60-year high and rising.

Gross government debt, according to the final budget outcome documents, rose to $420.4bn, or 25.5% of GDP, in June 2016. This is at the highest since 1971-72 when the Vietnam war effort was being funded.

Government debt is growing at a pace that will no doubt be the focus of the credit ratings agencies. Unless there is some miracle in terms of a growth spurt that fuels an unexpected windfall revenue gain to the government, further large budget deficits are likely in the near term, as are further increases in government debt……

Malcolm Turnbull & Co losing favour with rural/regional & older voters

The Australian, 3 October 2016

The Newspoll tables covering August-September 2016 clearly show the Turnbull Government continues to lose support in the electorate.

According to The Australian newspaper; The Turnbull government has lost support in every state since the election, with the sharpest falls in Western Australia, Queens­land and South Australia, and among older voters and those living outside the capital cities. A demographic analysis of Newspoll surveys conducted ­exclusively for The Australian since the July election also reveals Mr Turnbull’s support is weakest in his home state of NSW. Labor has made its biggest gains since the election among country voters, men and those aged over 50, with its biggest lift in South Australia and Queensland.

Like the Abbott Government before it, this government is increasingly seen as one which has achieved very little being led by a man who is either too frightened to govern or does not know how to govern effectively.

The ongoing issues with political probity certainly don’t help the Liberal and Nationals parliamentary parties with their public image – nor does the perception that far-right ideologues within their ranks have an inordinate influence on Coalition cabinet decisions.

Having squandered their double-dissolution card in order to achieve a slim two-vote majority in  the House of Representatives in July, holding only 30 of the 76 Senate seats and unable to go to another election until August 2018 at the earliest, one has to wonder how they will manage to turn matters around and regain the confidence of the national electorate.

Australian Government Data Retention: refraining from saying told you so......

ABC News, 29 September 2016:

The Health Department has removed data from its website amid an investigation into whether personal information has been compromised.

Australian Privacy Commissioner Timothy Pilgrim has launched an investigation after academics found it was possible to decrypt some service provider ID numbers in the Medicare Benefits Schedule and Pharmaceutical Benefits Schedule datasets.

In a statement, the Department of Health said the dataset published on data.gov.au did not include names or addresses of service providers and no patient information was identified.

"However, as a result of the potential to extract some doctor and other service provider ID numbers, the Department of Health immediately removed the dataset from the website to ensure the security and integrity of the data is maintained," it stated.

"No patient information has been compromised, and no information about the health service providers has been publicly identified or released."

Further comment has been sought.

The Guardian, 24 September 2016:

The Australian Bureau of Statistics inadvertently released contact names linked to more than 5,000 Queensland businesses in what was described as a “human error”.

The breach is one of 14 the ABS has reported to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner since 2013, and was released to Guardian Australia under freedom of information laws.

The ABS has come under scrutiny over its handling of the 2016 census, initially for the extended retention of names and addresses for a period of four years. It then faced further criticism after the census website crashed, which it attributed to a series of foreign attacks.

While none of the breaches reported to the OAIC relates to the handling of any census data, some do highlight errors in the handling of other surveys as well as failures to correctly de-identify data, which is one of the criticisms raised by privacy advocates about the increased retention of census data.

The Canberra Times, 4 October 2016:

The federal government is caught up in a second data privacy scare, this time involving a massive data-set on more then 96,000 of its public servants amid fears their confidential information might not be secure.

In the second potentially serious Commonwealth data breach to become public in less than a week, the public service's workplace authority has confirmed that it has withdrawn the data gathered in its massive annual employee census from public view.

It is feared that identification codes for departments and agencies could be used to identify the individual public servants who filled in the census, the largest workplace survey undertaken in Australia, on condition of anonymity.

The data has been taken down from official websites to be washed of any features that could be used to breach the privacy of government officials.

But the Australian Public Service Commission has confirmed the data-set was downloaded nearly 60 times before the take-down, meaning the raw information is in circulation with no way to control how it is used or distributed further......

What would happen if weird was contagious?

Given the Turnbull Government's weird response to the 28 September 2016 South Australian mega storm one wonders what would happen if its way of looking at renewable energy was contagious.

Perhaps something like this……

From the Independent on 14 December 2015:

A US town has rejected a proposal for a solar farm following public concerns.

Members of the public in Woodland, North Carolina, expressed their fear and mistrust at the proposal to allow Strata Solar Company to build a solar farm off Highway 258.

During the Woodland Town Council meeting, one local man, Bobby Mann, said solar farms would suck up all the energy from the sun and businesses would not go to Woodland, the Roanoke-Chowan News Herald reported.

Jane Mann, a retired science teacher, said she was concerned the panels would prevent plants in the area from photosynthesizing, stopping them from growing.

Ms Mann said she had seen areas near solar panels where plants are brown and dead because they did not get enough sunlight.

She also questioned the high number of cancer deaths in the area, saying no one could tell her solar panels didn't cause cancer….