Chris Richardson

The repayment of some Victorian government loans

um allowed the federal government to say uh at that stage right the budget is in good nick um you know whereas it was uh being propped up by one-off privatization uh receipts effectively um and and so uh economists including me said well hang on you know we need to fix that and we had a charter of budget honesty um our problem is that when we changed what we look at

We simply change the incentives for the politicians and don't get excited by one side or the other, right?

If you think one side of politics are genius and the other side are incompetent and evil, then you are a deep disappointment to your primary school maths teacher.

They are all flawed human beings and they are dealing with flawed incentives that we as a nation have given them.

And as soon as we change the incentives, as soon as we said, well, we're now going to concentrate on this budget measure, not that one.

It gave them an incentive to put different money.

Instead of privatising, we were sort of nationalising.

Suddenly we had all sorts of funds.

We've got funds around housing.

We've got funds around climate change.

We've got everything from the NBN to Snowy Hydro to student debt.

All sorts of things sit off budget.

They are not in the measure that we look at the most.

Right.

Uh, and, and the, the, the sort of punter way to think about it is I don't mind if something goes off budget.

Uh, if, if that's just a, you know, money's going to go out, but it's going to earn a bit of a return and that money will come back in.

I don't care.

I don't need to look at that closely.

It can go off budget.