Alan Kohler

Like it's going to be the end of, it's going to be the absolute end of business in this country as we know it.

Investing, no one's going to invest, no one's going to do anything.

You know, I think people get, people feel inclined to, I don't know, these are political documents, obviously budgets.

So people tend to go a bit extreme on them.

I mean, I always find it a bit bemusing, you know, that with companies what we do is we look at their results each year and the question is did they beat or miss their guidance and analyst forecasts and what were the results like, you know.

We actually don't get companies' budgets.

We know that they've got budgets.

They've got a budget line for every cost and revenue in the business, you know, and the budgets are looked at monthly by companies, but we don't actually get those.

What we get are their results.

With the government, we get the results each year in September.

Nobody cares.

Nobody looks at the results at all.

all we look at is the budget, right, which is their intention.

And, you know, the intention is and also they use the intentions are always over four or five years, what they call the forward estimates.

But we have elections every, on average, two and a half years.

And everything changes all the time.

I mean, even between elections, they change their mind every year.

So the intentions, the forward estimates intentions contained in each year's budget are completely irrelevant.

And we all sort of spend hours in a lock-up about it and write about it.

All right.