The Turnbull government's innovation package was launched on Monday with all the trappings of a budget – in a media lock-up accompanied a blizzard of fact sheets and costings. And, like any budget, some creative accounting.

The aim is to give the government plenty to crow about while not blowing out the budget deficit. The headline $1.1 billion in spending over four years is all new money, but there are still tricks.

The big one is the creation of a new $250 million Biomedical Translation Fund to commercialise medical research discoveries. As the fact sheets explain, the money is not new: the $250 million is being redirected from the government's existing Medical Research Future Fund. That fund, the centrepiece of the government's unpopular 2014 budget, is already depleted because the $7 GP co-payment supposed to help fund it was abandoned. The government insists the medical fund will be fully capitalised by 2020, meaning it will have to find money elsewhere to tip into it.