Turnbull needs to slap Treasury upside the head

Advertisement

The Turnbull Budget is under assault. Yesterday we had Treasury’s Nigel Ray on growth potential:

There was criticism of the Budget that the projections for real GDP growth over the medium term were too high.

Some have suggested these projections were raised in order to improve the Budget position. Can I say at the outset that this claim is simply not true. In fact, when Treasury introduced the current methodology in the 2014-15 Budget, we published analysis in a separate Working Paper showing that the impact of these changes on the underlying cash balance was very small – an increase of just one-tenth of a per cent of GDP by the end of the medium term.

The full text of this article is available to MacroBusiness subscribers

$1 for your first month, then:
Cancel at any time through our billing provider, Stripe
About the author
David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal. He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.