Accepting govt spin on numbers

Rodney Hide has an excellent piece of how the headlines of $3 billion more for defence, may in fact be a reduction in spending on defence as a proportion of GDP.

The key issues are how many years is this extra funding spread over, and how much is operational vs capital. For example an extra $1billion for a frigate to last 30 years is only $33 million or so per year.

It would be great if media actually refused to just take the spin as their headline, and actually analysed the actual composition of the package.

On a similar note I broke down the spin in January on the $225 million transport package for Wellington to point out that it it just $14 million a year for new roads, and that would only get you 500 metres a year of motorway.

To be fair when I worked in Government we enjoyed that the media would also take our funding packages over many years, and report them verbatim. However would be nice to have better scrutiny applied to all Governments.