The Budget

Today’s Sydney Morning Herald has TWENTY pages on the federal government budget.

TWENTY!

At best, the budget is a mind-fart dreamt up by a bunch of former university review types, with the primary goal of being re-elected against the mob with the different colour ties.

It’s a 12-month plan.

By the time it’s written, understood, and then introduced to parliament, argued about, defeated in the senate, ignored by bureaucrats, delayed by public servants & held up by external consultants, 12 months will have passed and a new one will be due.

The new one will be totally different to this one, as this one is totally different to the last one.

Looking at the last one, about 90% of what was projected to happen by way of budgeting never occurred for one reason or another.

And then Herald uses up TWENTY pages of good pulp mill product on the subject.

This must be because people are interested in the thing?

Why? It’s a mystery to me. But it clearly doesn’t help that the media covers the thing so intensively. Thirty years ago they did not.

Thinking further, the old-school broadcast media started doing this sort of stuff the minute on-line advertising alternatives emerged.

Essentially as the advertising dollars started drifting to the web (with all it’s wonderful measurability of advertising outcomes) broadcast media started looking for cheaper and cheaper ways of keeping people’s attention, in order to remain profitable on their reduced revenues.

The budget is but one example of a VERY cheap way to keep peoples attention. But not mine I am afraid.

Their online version is full of the same rubbish. You would think they would take the opportunity at their website to get great content from ‘anywhere’ and make it as attractive as possible to each viewer. Possibly even to curate the content for each user. I know they don’t do this because I am seeing a lot of ‘budget’ at their website.