| A beloved reader sent me a message this morning: Hey Joe, you are so incredibly cool and handsome and all-knowing about all-things, how come the opposition never release their costings til just before election day? I may have slightly paraphrased the first part but the second is an incredibly good question and something that very few members of the public even notice, let alone ask. Election costings are something that is usually left for newspaper journos to desperately tally up each day and economists to roll their eyes at. Quite frankly, they don’t add up. And I mean they literally don’t add up. This is true even of governments and even more so of oppositions. And when it comes to minor parties and independents we are talking about numbers that are simply plucked from the air — or perhaps some other darker and less hygienic place. And that’s because during an election campaign you are always going to want to promise more than you can possibly deliver and so you have to obscure your capacity to deliver as much as possible. Thus you will see Labor and the Coalition and the Greens put big reassuring price tags on their policies with assurances they are fully costed. But are they? Is the cost a one-off for a single year or is it recurring? And if it is recurring is it a cost across the forward estimates period — four years — or across a decade, which even the Budget doesn’t pretend to be able to predict? Brett Lethbridge takes a look at the Easter preference hunt. CHECK OUT MORE GREAT CARTOONS HERE Often you will see all these numbers rolled into a single figure, even though they apply to completely different types of spending across completely different time periods. Indeed, the closest you can get to any credible breakdown of spending is the Budget itself, but even there you will see billions of dollars missing for “measures taken but not yet announced” — i.e. election promises. In other words, it’s all bunkum. CLICK HERE FOR JOE HILDEBRAND'S FULL ANALYSIS | 