The cry of where is the money coming has gone up.
Labor says the Liberals have promised $542 million ($800 million on another estimate) over four years, blowing any hope of a Budget surplus. The Liberals say it is much less and they can get a surplus.
The problem for the Liberals is that they have not fully factored in the running costs of their promised new health facilitities. Their Ministers have also gone through the campaign promising things with attaching costs: mounted police (horses and bicycles), per-student private school funding, payroll tax relief, Gungahlin Drive to be dual carriageway and so on.
Under Liberal calculations, though, they can stay in surplus because they come off the 2004-05 result in the pre-election Treasury update, without factoring in all the the projected new programs and projects over the subsequent three years which are laid out in the Budget papers for 2004-05.
The trouble with that is, they have not said which of the already projected programs and projects will get the chop. That would be electorally unpopular.
There can be a ding dong over precise calculations, but the Liberals have promised hugely more than Labor. Labor is reluctant to match it because it knows it will be stuck with those expensive promises after the election. But Labor wants to look as if it is active and has a program for the future.
Its strategy is to to a lot of repetitive re-launching of stuff that has already been included in the forward years in the 2004-05 Budget. Given the singular lack of attention most voters pay to most ACT policy launches it seems fair enough. Only after multiple launches would you expect to reach the whole electorate.