Anyone interested in budget transparency?

Its tough going if you are looking for acknowledgment of improved transparency in some areas of government activity. Take the Federal Budget for example. Minister for Finance and Deregulation Lindsay Tanner, in an address to a CEDA conference two weeks ago, said that the improvements in the quality of information provided in this year's budget papers had received little media attention, and proceeded to spell out a raft of reforms in "many ways directed at making it easier to identify government waste and excess."

A Google news search indicates that no newspaper in the country devoted a column millimetre to what the Minister said.( Thanks to the anonymous reader who drew attention to Minister Tanner's own edited version of his speech published in The Australian, and to an opinion piece on his attendance at the CEDA meeting by Peter Cameron in the Gold Coast News. But as to analysis of what he had to say- the point still stands.)

So what do the experts make of Minister's claims? None of the better known commentators who blog on economic matters-such as Peter Martin ,Joshua Gans, John Quiggin or Andrew Leigh- said a word about it either.

We'll have to wait for departing Senator Andrew Murray's assessment of Operation Sunlight due sometime this month