$110,000 done, $69 billion to go

I actually read things. You know how you just click on “I agree to these terms and conditions” when joining something? Well, I’m the guy who often reads them. I confess that I don’t do it all the time, but every now and then I wonder just what I’m agreeing to. So far – I’m pleased to report that none have signed away the rights to your first born child or agreed that the person hosting the site has the right to eat anything in your fridge.

So, of course, I read the Liberal “Labor’s Little Book of Waste”, and for the most part I was unimpressed, but then Number 59: It’s costing the taxpayers $110,000 to supply 900 bureaucrats in Treasury with 350 litres of milk. It seems unclear from the document whether this $110,000 is per week or per year. However, if it’s per week I don’t know what the dairy farmers are complaining about. Until a Liberal troll reads this and tells me that I’m wrong. I’m taking the liberty of presuming that it’s per year. (To save them all the trouble, Dick of Sydney: “Youse is all morons, Labor puts everything on Mastercard so a litre of milk will cost the taxpayer $215,000 by the time the debt is paid of in 2054. I know coz I am an accountant like Barnaby Joyce.”)

When the Liberals said that they’d be able to fund their abolition of the Mining Tax, which the miners can’t afford to pay even though it’s only bringing in $200 million this year, or the Carbon Tax, which is costing every household lots and lots of money, yet still keep in place the compensation for the Carbon Tax, I was a little cynical. Just as I couldn’t see where the money for Abbott’s maternity leave scheme was coming from. Yes, I know that he planned to put a 1.5% levy on the big companies, but he also planned to reduce company tax by 1.5%. I didn’t see how he ended up with any net gain after that. (Dick of Sydney: “That’s just typical of you feral lefties, youse is all idiats and just resort to abuse. The witch lied you know, and Labor can’t add up so stop trying to blame the future government for things witch are all Labour’s folt”) But now it’s clear! They have identified 60 items of waste from Labor and once that milk money for those bureaucrats is stopped, we should be well on the way to the first billion.

Of course, they have a bit of problem with the fact that some of the things they identified were once only items, so you can’t expect every one of the 60 to yield a billion going into the future, but at least they haven’t listed the money going to elite private schools or subsidising millionaires as an example of waste!