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May 1st, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda One of the country’s leading economists says there is no economic imperative for the government to return the budget to surplus so quickly.
Labor has constantly pledged it will have a surplus, projected to be about $1.5 billion, in the budget it hands down on May 8.
Bank of America Merrill Lynch Australia chief economist Saul Eslake says the “accounting chicanery” that will be done to produce a surplus in 2012/13 is a “bit silly”.
That includes moving spending measures forward or backward, and pushing revenue that might have been collected at a different time into that financial year.
But this kind of moving things around wouldn’t have any adverse impact on the economy, Mr Eslake said.
“To me what it underscores is that the objective of having a budget surplus by 2012/13 is more of a political objective … than it is an absolute dictate of economic management,” he told ABC Television on Tuesday.
He said that in fact, the headline budget balance would stay in deficit at least until 2014/15 and probably beyond then because of the way the government was treating the national broadband network rollout.
It would be only the underlying budget balance – described by Mr Eslake as an “artificial construct that was invented by Peter Costello” – that would be in surplus.
“But we’ve all been trained over the last 12 years or so to focus on the so-called underlying balance rather than the headline balance, which is what in every other country would be the focus of public attention,” he said.
“If the government was paying for the NBN through Stephen Conroy’s department rather than by subscribing to shares … then it would be an even bigger task again to have the budget in surplus.”
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