It’s a sad truth that treasurers and finance ministers almost never avoid using creative accounting to make their budgets look better – or less worse – than they really are. But this fudging often costs taxpayers a lot more.

Governments of both colours, federal and state, have been doing this forever, after the bureaucrats show them how. It’s one of the less honourable services public servants provide their honourable masters.

The move from cash accounting to accrual accounting at the turn of the century should have made fudging harder, but federal Treasury solved that problem by sticking to cash while Finance moved to accrual.

Focusing public attention on the cash budget balance has kept alive the oldest and simplest form of fudge. You can make the new year’s budget deficit look smaller than it really is by taking a payment due sometime in the new year and paying it in the last days of the old year.