What's the Point?????????????

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-05-14/kohler-budget-2013-analysis/4688294

"But it does add $2,285 million in net new government spending from now until June 30 next year."

"Tickle the actual numbers in the budget papers and they'll laughingly confess to being as soft as a baby's bum."

Why do we have taxes which create revenue for the government? First and foremost it is for governments to provide services back to us. This requires the hiring of public servants to provide those services at the coal face. 

Secondly, if we go out into society and markets and see things which need to be improved, and our ideology leads us to believe that government is the most efficient and best placed entity to address these needs, then it will require funds to perform this task, and this funding must come out of revenue.

So sometimes, when there is a screaming need identified, revenue needs to increase to cover that need, fix it, and increase the common good.

All budgets are estimates, sometimes guesstimates in times of extreme uncertainty. They start with an estimate of income over the financial period under consideration. For governments income is tax revenue which varies with the state of the economy. 

When the proceeds from the mining resource rent tax came in at a fraction of their projection a lot of people were running around screaming robbery and obfuscation. This reflects a lack of understanding of the nature of a resource rent tax. 

This category of tax specifically taxes entities low, when their costs are high, ie in the construction phase, and high when costs are low, ie in the production phase. It is precisely for this reason that they are recognised as an efficient tax.  

For the financial periods under consideration, all the massive mining projects expected to overflow the coffers of the mining resource rent tax were still under construction, and therefore taxed low because costs were high. It was to be expected that revenues would be well below projections based on producing mines.

These massive projects are now moving into production and will provide a dividend in the mining resource rent coffers for years to come.

Is this recognised in the budget? Who knows and who cares. 

What's the point of getting your knickers in a knot over a bunch of estimates based on insufficient data about an uncertain future.