Stephen Duckett writes in The Conversation (10.3.15):
‘The 2015 Intergenerational Report adopts the same mixed focus as the previous three: it looks both on the economy broadly and the Commonwealth budget specifically. It captures the big picture about ageing, productivity growth, GDP and so on.
‘Yet when it comes to budget impacts, it is truly myopic. It describes the impact on the Commonwealth budget with great clarity but its description of the impact on the budgets of the states and territories is so out of focus as to be non-existent.
‘This doesn’t matter for those areas of government expenditure that are solely the preserve of the Commonwealth, but it has a significant impact in areas of policy where responsibility is shared and there are significant intergovernmental transfers.’