Treasury partisan and incompetent

Comments on Glenn Milne “Mandarin's partiality”, 12/10/2009, http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,26195542-7583,00.html

Some of the Treasury recent views are suspicious, to say the least. They either indicate they are incompetent, or very biased.

The budget economic forecast for out years as a sustained above trend growth following this severe great global recession, is a prime example.

Another example is the argument about the so called structural budget deficit that had been caused by the previous government. It was completely ludicrous. To argue that the previous government caused it a few years earlier when there was no sign of economic trouble and did not say anything about the Rudd government's first budget spending and still implementing the tax cuts in its second budget is so blindly partisan.

The third one is about the asymmetry in the advice by treasury about the economic stimulus: before it introduction it was “go early, go hard and go households”; but when every sign had already indicated that Australia had not had a recession and the economy was doing well, then they say withdrawal the stimulus will cause 100000 jobs.

There is no question that the top economic bureaucrat has become partisan and that Treasury has lost its economic competency.