Posted by actually, I don’t even buy tim tams …
They are, however, the only thing that I can be sure is in the cost of living basket that the Government used for their carbon tax ‘cost of living’ calculation.
This is just another case of this government getting the politics badly wrong. They should have announced everything at once, made all the models, data and assumptions available on a Treasury website (which is now the best academic standard), and relied on the BIG story to dominate the tedious technical whines of folks like me.
Instead, they buried the detail…
Now that the BIG story has got everyone’s attention – and faded enough to leave some space for other memes – people will pay attention when all their assumptions are picked apart. This may prove especially damaging if a minister gets a question on details wrong.
The modelling document is opaque to say the least. For example, it doesn’t clearly state the assumptions about the rest of the world that are embedded into the reference scenario. Ergas reckons the base case assumes global action by 2016 (after initially coming to the conclusion the medium global action was the base case, I didn’t blog on it, as I couldn’t figure out why Australian GNI was higher than the base case in the medium global action scenario).
Folks already mistrust the Government – because of this, the optimal amount of obfuscation is lower than they judge.
ricardian ambivalence 