DO WE TRUST IN POLLIES’ WORDS AND NUMBERS?

WAR is waging in the Far North once again, but it is a very different battleground to the last time we voted. A post-Covid election was always going to be interesting, set against a backdrop of more than $300bn in direct economic support shelled out since the beginning of the pandemic. We are running out of money. Politicians would rather not depress us by dwelling on it too much during an election but that will all change once the count is done.

If Labor wins, there will be much stern headshaking about the books being even worse than expected.

If it’s the LNP, we will be asked to roll with the punches even though they had the ledger all along.

Whoever is prime minister, one thing is almost certain.

Funding for an inexplicable number of big-ticket election promises will be pushed off into the never-never, outside the four-year forward estimates.

We will get a taste here and a sniff there – maybe a million-dollar feasibility study spent in 2023-24 that the government assures us is critical to said project going ahead.

The truth is in the numbers. The Coalition has only committed $201.3m for Leichhardt compared with $938m at the last election.

Labor has more on the table but its commitment list is more shoebox than war chest this time around.

It has $560m worth of projects on the table for Leichhardt, little more than half of its $990m plan in 2019.

The vote in Leichhardt will come down to trust and track record.

Do we believe the Coalition has delivered what it promised?

Do we believe Labor will come good on its pledges, which are more than double those of the LNP?

And finally, do we believe the minor party players are any better?