Queensland budget – profligacy for everyone except the PS

John Quiggin18 Comments

Queensland Treasurer Tim Nicholls has just brought down his first budget, following the announcement by Premier Campbell Newman of massive public service job cuts justified by apocalyptic rhetoric. Yet apart from those job cuts, the budget (in combination with measures announced previously) doesn’t show much in the way of fiscal discipline. Among the most glaring examples

* An $80 handout to all households, with no targeting, nominally to offset water bills
* A previously announced freeze on electricity prices for households, paid for out of general revenue
* The replacement of the $7000 first home buyers grant with a $15 000 grant for buyers of new homes
* Handouts to tourism, racing and other sectors

Measures like this are par for the course for state budgets, but not what you’d expect from a government faced with a fiscal crisis, comparable to Greece or Spain.

The government has fiddled at the edges on revenue, but is doing nothing (or even adding to the distortionary concessions) on payroll tax and land tax.

In essence, the government is relying almost entirely on cuts to the public service, focused on the health sector. This is a high-risk strategy to put it mildly. It may well be that the health bureaucracy is bloated and inefficient, but that doesn’t mean that creating a new layer of regional management is going to improve things, especially when their first task is to implement arbitary cuts in the number of nurses and other employees. Campbell Newman says his promise that “frontline jobs are safe” now means “frontline services won’t be affected by job cuts” but this is just wishful thinking. There hasn’t been any analysis of how to improve efficiency, just an edict that numbers need to be cut.

In these circumstances, it’s virtually inevitable that waiting lists will blow out. And inevitably, when you have long waiting lists, people will die waiting. At that point, the question will be whether the government can hold its nerve and admit that it was lying about the frontline services, or whether we’ll see expensive panic measures to fix the problem.

Trauma

Jacques Chester28 Comments

Last night the Ozblogistan network slowed down and then began to “yo-yo” — stop working and then reappear cyclically.

I have been becoming increasingly dissatisfied with WPEngine’s reliability and service. Tis was the straw that broke the camel’s back. So I began a crash move of the network to a new hosting service, Page.ly.

That is why the site was unavailable last night and this morning, and why you first saw kittens and then a little moving truck.

Page.ly’s service has already shown itself to be much better than WPEngine’s; however they have reported back that migration is going slowly because the WPEngine servers periodically drop the connection they’re using to download files.

Their advice was to switch back to WPEngine’s servers for today. Any posts or comments from today could then be migrated using the WXR import/export facility built into WordPress.

So here we are, temporarily back at WPEngine. Tonight I and the Page.ly staff will try the move again.

A few hours ago WPEngine finally traced the problem back the recent comments widget on Skepticlawyer and Catallaxy Files. I’ve disabled those for now. (Amazing how much their service has improved, now that I’m leaving).

Auditing the audit commission

John Quiggin24 Comments

I’ve just finished a critique of the audit commission. Here’s the Courier-Mail report. There’s another report also due out today from Bob and Betty Walker, who were commissioned by the QCU. I did mine independently, but, like them, with the aim of being out in time for next week’s Budget. From the CM report, it looks as if we are in fairly close agreement, which isn’t that surprising – much of the analysis is the same as that we both used in critiques of the previous Labor government’s asset sales policy.

A bit early for monument building …

John Quiggin29 Comments

… unless you expect to be in for one term at most. Having announced that Queensland is on the verge of defaulting on its public debt, as in Greece and Spain, and sacked thousands of public servants, Campbell Newman is now proposing to build a brand-new office tower in the Brisbane CBD, to be financed by the sale of up to 20 other buildings including heritage assets. Apart from the economics, this is a direct breach of the LNP promise, crucial to its election victory, not to undertake asset sales before the next election. The project is being sold as “self-financing”, but this claim appears to rely almost entirely on rosy scenarios and magical ponies.

Proposals like this make sense of one of the more puzzling features of the Costello Commission of Audit, namely its insistence that the capital expenditure projections of the previous government were unsustainably low. The projections appeared reasonable on the assumption that, in straitened times, there wouldn’t be any major new initiatives, as opposed to maintaining and modestly extending existing infrastructure. But, obviously Costello understood that Campbell Newman (like Anna Bligh) was not the kind of Premier who could forgo lots of TV appearances in a hard hat. In this context, it’s worth re-examining his record as Lord Mayor which involved buying short-term popularity at the expense of long term debt – exactly the opposite of what he now says Queensland needs

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Fundraising appeal – $130 to go

John Quiggin3 Comments

I seem to be back on air for the moment, so I’m taking the chance to appeal for doantions to the HeartKids appeal. My team partner Flavio and I have committed to raise $2000, but we are still $130 short. Please help to push us over the line, and we will push to get ourselves over the line in Noosa. Just click on the link and give money!

It’s broken

Jacques Chester18 Comments

Hello everyone, your friendly Ozblogistan Tyrant here.

Ozblogistan was moved to new servers on Monday night by some subcontractors. The ensuing few days have been a mess because the move was only incompletely successful. In particular, bloggers have been unable to log into the wordpress backend to write posts or moderate comments.

This morning a threw a switch and it appears as though we are slowly coming back online. I’m very sorry for the disruption.