Dishonesty is very clearly in surplus over Budget Treasurer Wayne Swan was always going to get to red ink Tuesday fortnight, says Terry McCrann. Picture: Gary Ramage Source: News Limited IT'S budget time again and the D-word should be front and centre. No, not the one that everyone's actually focused on - deficit. But capital D for Dishonesty. The industrial-strength lies that Treasurer Wayne Swan and Prime Minister Julia Gillard have been telling about the budget, stretching back to before the 2010 election; the lies that they are telling about the budget now; and the way they made Treasury an accomplice to their dishonesty. For the past three years, we've been told - again and again, and then, in case we had been in Antarctica or in a coma, again and again - not only would the budget be back in surplus this 2012-13 year, absolutely non-negotiably and without qualification but that it was imperative it get back into surplus this year. That all manner of disasters would rain down from the heavens if it didn't. Now, suddenly everything's turned exactly 180 degrees. Not only is the budget going to still be in deficit this year but it will stay in deficit in future years. That is if they actually tell us the full truth in two weeks. The starting point is to understand why the promise was made in the first place. It was the twin sister promise to the carbon tax. Two lies aimed at stealing - sorry, winning - the 2010 election. There will be no carbon tax under a government I lead. There WILL be a surplus. The first is to bury the well-justified fear that a re-elected Gillard Government would impose a crazy stupid "big new tax." Just how big we are now discovering, with our $23-plus tax close to four times the tax in Europe, the spiritual home of the climate-crazies. The second is to (try to) bury the equally justified fear that Labor governments just can't be trusted with the money. That they are irresistibly big-taxing and even bigger-spending governments, that inevitably give us budget deficits. Just how irresistible, and just how big those deficits, we are now discovering. Treasurer Swan: six budgets, six deficits, adding to nearly $200 billion - about $8000 for every single one of us. And counting. As Gillard herself noted the other night, in a rare outburst of non-obfuscation, the last Labor surplus was in 1989. And we will be a long time waiting for the next. In all this, there's a second (or third) D-word: Dumb. Yes, the two lies helped steal/win the election. But the first was dispensed with very quickly, yet they persisted with the surplus, tricking up the figures through budget and budget update after budget and budget update. As long as Treasurer and Treasury could put a surplus number in the predicted 2012-13 bottom line, that was all that seemed to matter to them, no matter how absurdly small. At the last, they were clinging to a $1 billion surplus (in a $400 billion budget - it required only a 0.2 per cent variation to wipe it out). No matter how many and how outrageous, and how increasingly desperate, the fiddles required to pretend to get it. So, in the last Budget, they predicted they would actually cut spending this year - something that has just never happened before. And in his last desperate play, Swan brought forward the budget update to October, to try to beat the - inevitable - bad news. Talk about industrial-strength dumb. He was always going to get to red ink Tuesday fortnight. And hope that he could spin it away, by claiming it would now be "irresponsible" to slash just to get a surplus. No, it would have been better - and honest - not to make the absurd promise in the first place. And even better, not to have splashed the spending around in the first place, and every year since. Budget spending next year will be about $390 billion. In the last (Peter) Costello budget it was $270 billion. That's an increase of 44 per cent. Revenue next year will be up nearly $100 billion on the last Costello budget. That's about the same increase that Costello got in his last six budgets, and every one of them was a surplus. A real one.