THIS year’s ACT Budget has been generally well received.

All the groups that live on Government funding have avoided pain so they’re thrilled.

Additionally the Government is promising to borrow lots of money to give to Canberra’s business sector so they’re feeling pretty sweet and the Chamber of Commerce is conspicuous in its silence.

The Liberals wouldn’t be happy either way and our rates haven’t tripled yet so what do they know?

But for those of us unlucky enough to actually read budget papers ever year there’s a disturbing trend.

The oldest budget readily available online is 2011-12. If you look in Budget Paper 2 (go to paper in every budget) “Working Smarter. Delivering More” make note of the Net Operating Balance.

So in its current year things are as bad as it gets, 2012-13 things get better, and from then on it’s salad days with the budget entering warm sunlit uplands. Bear in mind the global financial crisis was 2007-8. Old news even then.

Now let us turn our eye to 2012-13 “Supporting The Economy Supporting Jobs”.

Again, the current year is as bad as it gets but we’re going to turn it around next year.

Let’s bear witness to the whole tragic parade and turn our eyes to last year’s 2013-14 “Building and transforming Canberra” (One hopes readers are enjoying the stalinist slogans of the passing years as much as your correspondent).

This year, finally, we thought we might have improved things, with golden years coming out in 2015-16.

Which brings us to this year’s budget (“Investing in Canberra”) where we find Canberra, as before, wallowing right in the bottom of the hypothetical S-Bend.

Oh wait, 2012-13 was worse than we thought, 2013-14 is no better, 2014-15 is even worse still, and then the magic pixies’ dust of optimism kicks in and we can project massive improvements and soaring revenues.

Our minds turn immediately to South Park’s deathless Underpants Gnomes.

Phase 1: Collect underpants, Phase 2: …, Phase 3: Profit

It is true that ACT Government debt is low compared to other States. But our revenue base is much more fragile as well. We’re unlikely to see booming mining royalties.

Andrew Barr says this year is a special year of growing borrowing and falling revenue. But he seems to say that every year.

It would be nice if the graph wasn’t consistently reliant on the belief in a magic S bend, with the ACT budget consistently at the very bottom of it.