It is fair enough for the Prime Minister to use the forum of Sunday night commercial television to get his message out to people about his views and actions on the global financial crisis.  It is reasonable for any politician to use any means at their disposal to try to inform people about what they are doing.

But I certainly hope that before the week is out the Prime Minister will also use the forum of Parliament to provide the financial details to justify what he is doing.  The sudden stimulus package, particular coming on top of talk of bringing forward infrastructure spending, is basically a mini-Budget without the documentation. Given the current economic uncertainty, any budget forward estimates would be even more of an estimate than usual – after estimate is partly just a fancy term for guessing – but those guesses are being used to make some major decisions at the moment, and it’s just not good enough to take such major economic measures without providing the details to verify what they are based on.

Over the weekend, we also had talk by Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner that income tax cuts may be brought forward as well if more economic stimulus is needed.

I don’t dispute that all of these things may be a good idea (other than the big boost to the First Home Owners Grants, which I still think is bad policy), but there really should be a more formal statement provided to the Parliament to enable closer scrutiny of how solid the economic foundations are for the government’s actions.

Senate Estimates Committees are meeting this week, so even if the government won’t produce a formal statement to Parliament, there will no doubt be efforts made through the Senate to get some more solid data.