This corrupt gov can't help itself - to lie and mislead about their incompetence is their instinctive reaction at every single turn.
The sooner these pack of incompetent corrupt twits are baseball batted out of office the better chance this country has of recovering from their widely excess spending as a consequence of promising the needy, vunerable and desperate half witted fools sweet nothings on the never never.
Piers Akerman Thursday, April 25, 2013(5:37pm)
TRUE to form, the Gillard government is trying to lie its way out of trouble and accuse the opposition of the offence that it - the Labor-Green-independent minority administration - actually committed.
Prime Minister Julia Gillard and Treasurer Wayne Swan repeatedly promised a budget surplus next month - not Opposition Leader Tony Abbott.
Over the past three years, Gillard and Swan made the surplus an article of faith with their pledges and promises to bring the budget into the black.
Here is a sampling of Gillard’s embarrassing remarks: “The budget will be back in surplus in 2013 if I’m re-elected, if my government is re-elected on Saturday ... the budget is coming back to surplus, no ifs no buts, it will happen.” August 17, 2010.
“Failure is not an option here and we won’t fail.” August 18, 2010.
“My commitment to a surplus in 2012-13 was a promise made and it will be honoured.” April 13, 2011.
“We saved jobs, stayed out of recession and got back to surplus.” July 4, 2011.
Totally false, of course, as was her July 24, 2011, claim: “So, we’ve got a good track record of making the hard decisions to find savings to get the budget to add up, we’ll do it again and the budget will come to surplus in 2012-13, exactly as promised.”
Hard decisions? That should be ha-ha-ha decisions.
Just last April 29, she was still at it: “Here we are in Australia due to the careful management of the government, we have a strong economy, strong fundamentals, low unemployment. What that means is it’s unambiguously in our nation’s interest to deliver a budget surplus, and we will.”
No, we won’t. And we were never going to.
Last August 19 she assured Sky News viewers that that surplus was non-negotiable. Treasurer Wayne Swan was just as foolish, if not more so. He told Sunrise’s David Koch last August 18: “Come hell or high water, but we’ve got the judgment to handle these situations. If we would have gone into recession we wouldn’t be in this position and that’s where we would have been if the Liberals had been in power.”
It all changed four days before Christmas: “Obviously, dramatically lower tax revenue now makes it unlikely that there will be a surplus in 2012-13,” Swan told reporters. “It’s not because the government is spending too much, it’s because we didn’t collect the amount of taxes that we expected to collect.”
Pure baloney. Claptrap and bunkum of Gillardian magnitude.
When Swan acknowledged the irrefutable last December, he accepted new figures which showed a $4 billion write-down in cash receipts during the first four months of the financial year.
This week The Grattan Institute warned the end of the mining boom and spiralling health costs would cripple both state and federal government budgets. Spending cuts and tax hikes worth at least $60 billion a year would be needed to return budgets to balance."There is pain coming for everyone,” institute chief executive John Daley said. “If any political leader tells you otherwise then you should not elect them.”
The Grattan report was prepared before Swan dropped the further bombshell that there had been “a hit, if you like, a sledgehammer to revenues in the budget since the mid-year update of something like $7.5 billion”.
Swan then blamed the global financial crisis for stripping $160 billion from tax revenues.
Swan now asks his dwindling audience to look at the opposition’s aspiration to return the budget to surplus in its first term should it win office.
That hope was, however, always based firmly on the budgetary outlook figures provided by Labor, and as they collapsed, so inevitably would the opposition’s aspiration become less achievable.
But said Swan: “I don’t think there’s going to be any excuses from Mr Abbott and the Liberal Party. The fact is they, in a really sneaky way, have snuck this announcement out because they’ve always claimed they will bring the budget back to surplus.”
Hogwash. Abbott didn’t sneak out any announcement. He was bold and clear when he stated his position on Sky News’ Agenda.
Labor is now locked into a culture of lies and dissembling. Examples are legion. One appeared in an ALP advertisement on the front page of the Launceston newspaper Wednesday in which it was stated that “Abbott wants to take a $500 million bite from our GST”.
To accept that you would have to ignore the fact that the states and territories, not the federal government, must agree on GST distribution. You would also have to overlook Tasmania’s Labor Premier Lara Giddings having made no representation to the Grants Commission to alter or justify funding for her state.
If you were actually prepared to swallow such an obvious lie, you probably voted Labor anyway.
