Turnbull cooks the books - $14 billion from 2014 budget rejected by senate, counted

What happened to treating the Australian public like we're intelligent? FFS this is insane.

Just under $14 billion dollars worth of Team Abbott's savings in his first and disastrous 2014 budget, which have been comprehensively rejected by the senate and have not the slightest hope in hell of being passed, have been counted towards the budget bottom line now in the mid year economic outlook thingo. 

Yes, that means they've counted $14billion dollars in the positive that doesn't exist. So already from day one, the mid year budget is out by that much.

Why do people keep thinking the Lieberals are good at economics? 

And included in that deteriorating bottom line are old savings included in policies that the Senate has steadfastly refused to pass – which means the budget update counts “savings” that are “wholly unrealistic”, according to the Australian Council of Social Service (Acoss). 

Among the “savings” still counted in the budget update despite being rejected are: 

* The $4.8bn that would be saved by the latest version of proposed cuts to family payments, even though Labor has only passed $500m of them; 
* $3.2 bn from increasing the interest rate for student loans and requiring that they be paid back sooner; 
* $1.1bn from cutting university funding; 
* $1.3bn for the proposed $5 hike in the PBS co-payment that was supposed to start in January; 
* Over $600m in rejected welfare savings, including forcing under-25s to wait a month to receive the dole, which was rejected by the Senate in September. The Guardian