People, including Kerry O'Brien trying to convince Joe Hockey to back down last night, seem to thing that the anything from Treasury is the word of God. Ken Henry is infallible.

Even the Pope doesn't claim to be infallible these days.

Those of us who have such faith in the Treasury and the mortals who run it don't seem to recognise that global expertise (they love the global village and the resulting inteference with Australia normally)has a different idea about recovery.

Treasury has been wrong before, and ALP Governments have always been wrong.

Talk about codswallop.
Your whole premise for the article is "Treasury has not had a good record in recent years in forecasting budget revenues" yet you show absolutely no evidence of such mistakeness.
You reference Yes Minister as if it was real and not a tv show.
On one hand you have treasury handing out good advice to labor in the 70s and 80s that was ignored then have johnny howard ignoring and not even asking them for advice. If they are so crap and useless then why would anyone listen to them and isnt ignoring them the point of your article. So didnt whitlam etc do the right thing by not listening to their advice? After all that is what your saying Ruddy should do.

You really are confused arent you. Treasury is crap then treasury is correct then it may or may not be correct. Then they didnt model the work laws or emissions scheme so they are crap again.
You should make up your mind mate and stick to number fiddling and leave the words alone.

The budget forecasting by labor has a couple of extremely worrying factors.

There is a massive debt of $300bn assuming:
The economy recovers, and
Labor severely restricts its spending after this stimulus.

This means a dire situation as a best case scenario. There is absolutely no contingency in the event that:
Treasury have miscalculated, or
There is a need for further spending in the next 6 years.

My view is that it is a case of spend now and hope for the best. the treasury prediction may well be accurate, and I hope to god it is, but I am uneasy about jumping without a reserve parachute.

Prudent planning would at least consider that the rosy scenario might not eventuate, and have a fall back plan.

Like Noah and ark dear old Des is always with us,has he ever got anything right I don think so,just another right wing hack like Leigh,as long as its not Labour,lets get back to right wing crooks who caused this,and Pete the spineless to run Treasury and all will be well.
And maybe if we are lucky Rush Limbaugh will come and pat you all on the head,Joe Hockey is a dunce and a man with an overinflated sense of his own importance

On the ABC news this morning,

The labor minister admitted that there was a large margin of error in the treasury estimates.

So John, your spew at Leigh appears completely unfounded.

A large plate of crow is in order.

Poor Libs must be feeling a tad left out.
Just because Howard ignored Treasury and ramped up spending to consume all of the *temporary* income during a boom does not mean that governments should ignore the independent body that is charged with this function.
Who would you rather we believe? "Independent" think tanks?
The time for voodoo economics is past.
Pandering to the profiteers has got us into the worst financial crisis ever. We are not listening to your marketing messages anymore.
The easy money is gone and now we have to grow up and face facts. We cannot afford middle class welfare nor corporate welfare nor the cronyism and corruption of the Libs.
Yes, governments can and should take the advice of the independent body most suited to give unbiased facts. Of course it is not 100% accurate. Nothing is! Grow up. The Liberals approach to opposition is even more cynical than it was in government.
Lets just call them the "profiteer, fear and BS" party...or for public consumption: "Happy profits, righteous wars, yay for us" party.
We seriously need an opposition to keep Labor in line, but this bunch of wackos is *not* a good opposition.