Joe Hockey and Andrew Robb gave us a list of numbers but no explanation of how they add up

Coalition costings: we finally get them and they're just political fluff

It would be funny if it wasn’t so serious.

After three years of wailing and moaning about waste and budget emergencies and crises and Armageddon, the Liberal party today released its “costings”. And what is the upshot of all their attacks on waste and mismanagement? Well, they predict their budget bottom line will be $6bn better off over the forward estimates (i.e. over four years).

Six billion dollars over four years. Or, given the total revenue over that time will be about $1,657bn, that’s about 0.36% of the budget over those years. Not a lot of room for error.

But they were about attacking waste. There was oodles of it, don’t you know. So how did they end up $6bn better off?

Well, today Joe Hockey and Andrew Robb, in a laughable 22-minute press conference, announced they will be cutting the growth of the foreign aid budget by $4.5bn, rephasing the water buyback scheme from over four years to over six years (a saving of $650m over four years) and a further 0.25% efficiency dividend for the public service to get $428m.

Those three measures account for 92% of the improvement of the Liberal party’s budget bottom line.

Talk about taking the tough choices. Cutting the growth in foreign aid. Who knew that was the biggest waste in government spending!

Hockey today tried to sell the line that the cut to the foreign aid budget was to pay for infrastructure. You can believe that if you want, but he might as well have said he was cutting it to help pay for their paid parental leave scheme.

Remember, their scheme costs about $6.4bn more than the current system, so the extra cuts announced today pretty much make up that difference.

Hockey, for all his talk on ending the age of entitlement, has pledged to reverse the changes to the fringe benefit tax, which would have added $1.795bn to the budget. I guess people claiming their cars as a tax dodge is an entitlement that doesn’t need to end just yet.

The shorter version of the costings released today is that all the real “tough” (i.e. politically tough) cuts will be in the post-election “commission of audit”.

According to Hockey, “the commission of audit is focused on getting rid of the waste and having a more efficient public sector”.

This morning on ABC’s AM, Tony Abbott was asked if he would proceed with further cuts in government spending “before seeking a mandate”. He replied: “Where we can do government better it would be silly of us not to, but we won’t do anything that’s inconsistent with our mandate, we won’t do anything that is a breach of faith with the public.”

Given both Abbott and Hockey have talked long and hard about “getting rid of the waste”, they will probably claim they have a mandate to cut anything their commission of audit recommends as being “waste”.

Rather surprisingly, given it is such a key policy, this morning Abbott revealed he hasn’t even decided who will head the commission.

So today we were told to take on faith what will happen from that audit process.

I would be prepared to do that if their actual costings, released today, did not also require such faith.

Hockey and Robb said today, “The Coalition has released over 700 pages of detailed policy documents ... and released the great bulk of its savings (around 75%) on Wednesday last week, a full 10 days before the end of the campaign.”

But that is just sales talk. The “detailed policy documents” are mostly political fluff with some numbers but little explanation of how the numbers were arrived at.

Today we got an eight page document with lots of numbers but no explanation of the assumptions and parameters of how those numbers were reached.

There is no doubt that these numbers do add up. There are no big black holes. I have no doubt the parliamentary budget office has correctly estimated the final numbers (although Direct Action, the border protection policy and the alternative NBN were not costed by the PBO.) But we have no idea of what assumptions were used or some of the requirements around the policy.

Last week, the ALP released its costing documents for the cutting of the public service by 20,000, which claimed it would save $4.3bn over the forward estimates. The Liberal party’s policy to cut the public service by just 12,000 is, however, expected to save $5.2bn.

One difference between the two policies is that the LNP’s cuts start in 2013-14, whereas the ALP’s only begin in 2014-15. But we still don’t really know why the figures are so different. Any detail which would provide you with the ability to make a learned assumption of the validity of the policies is absent.

All we have today is a list of numbers.

No detail.

Three years ago, when the Liberal party released their “costings” numbers, I asked a Fairfax economics journalist what he thought. Back then he replied,

“Costings just one line per item – no assumptions, no reasoning. Treasury and Finance would have provided a touch more.”

You could say exactly the same this time around.

We’ve been played for mugs.

Sure the numbers add up, but we don’t know why, we don’t know how.

And that is why nothing has changed. We're still waiting: