Opposition Leader John Howard’s assertion that the people of Australia have loss faith the government carries some weight. Governments have got into the habit of dressing up an otherwise depressing picture in an attempt to make things look rosy. Voters are now getting wise to it. Unlike the boy who cries wolf, the politicians are crying nirvana.
Though the assertion came from Mr Howard, there is no guarantee that his side will be any different if it is ever in power for a long period. It seems to be the nature of modern communications that media manipulation and image creation goes hand-in-hand with politics.
The only way to improve things is if Oppositions before elections promise and if elected early in their term put into effect measures to ensure that accurate information about government conduct is available to the people.
An example was the promise by Gareth Evans while in Opposition to bring in Freedom of Information law, even if the fulfilled promise was later watered down.
Another example is Mr Howard’s Charter of Budget Honesty. In some respects it is of greater importance than freedom of information because it will measure overall economic performance of politicians, rather than the specific performance of bureaucrats.
Over the past half decade, Australia has witnessed a range of budgetary tricks to misrepresent the true financial picture. One was to move the Budgetary year or change methods of measurements from year to year to make comparisons of performance impossible. Most of them involve cunning trade-offs between capital and current accounts, such as the selling off of assets to create an artificial surplus. In the ACT a year ago accounting methods were used to make projections look better than the reality by indexing revenue and not indexing expenditure.
In the ACT the new Government promised to introduce accrual accounting and last week met the reality of the Vitab loss _ the incompetence and naiveté of the former Government led to ACT ratepayers shelling out $3.3 million the Vanuatu-based betting agency. There never was any prospect of the accounting trick of making a statutory authority pay off what was a public liability working.
That said, promises in Opposition and early in a Government’s term are easily made and met. The important things for Australia is to establish permanent at Federal and state level budgetary standards against which the government’s performance and financial standing can be measured and against which promises can be funded.