Disappointment front-loaded

The Australian government is apparently moving into a September election with a budget which is unglamorous and electoral prospects fading into oblivion.  This excellent article by Ross Gittins points to a poor assessment of the Swan-Gillard era:

This is the weirdest budget you or I are ever likely to see. That doesn't make it bad - just very strange.
With just four months until the election, it's the most unlikely pre-election budget you could imagine, with loads of nasties and next to no sweeteners. It is  more like a post-election budget, particularly the kind you get after a change of government.
Usually when governments know they are going to lose, they  go for broke, offering electoral bribes they know they will never have to find a way to pay for, aiming to minimise their loss of seats.
Not this time. This budget is more likely to cost Labor votes than win it any.
No, the purpose of this budget is not vote-buying – it is reputation-rescuing, a last-ditch attempt to influence what history will say about the Rudd-Gillard government  as an economic manager (here).

While it has been a tough time globally, the article gives a sense of the extent of the budget failure:

This time last year, Swan boasted of budgeting for four surpluses in a row, as though they were in the bag. His surplus of $1.5 billion for the financial year just ending is now expected to be a deficit of $19.4 billion (but even that isn't yet certain). This year his boast of being able to get the budget back to a surplus of $6.6 billion in 2016-17 (again on the basis of Treasury's long-range projections) will draw understandable cynicism.

To this it should be added that the worst of the coming crises (property crash, domestic slowdown, slowing of foreign capital inflows and end of the China and mining booms) have not hit yet - when they do, how bad will it be?

Much, much worse.

Cash in the attic...

...will be better than cash in the bank after 3 years...

....HOUSEHOLDS face losing up to $109 million from their family savings as the Federal government moves to seize cash from inactive bank accounts....After legislation was rushed through parliament, the government will from May 31 be able to transfer all money from accounts that have not been used for three years into their own revenues....

"It is very hard to see why this needed to be rushed through but there have been suggestions it was done more for the government's own financial circumstances rather than customers needs," he said.....Mr Munchenberg warned that unaware customers face having accounts frozen and could face months of delays trying to reclaim their won money from ASIC.....This cash grab comes as economists warn the government is on track to hand down a $15 billion budget deficit in May as company tax receipts collapse....(here)