"Both the Auckland Chamber of Commerce and Infometrics have behaved in a thoroughly unprofessional manner as they cannot
possibly know what our full fiscal programme for the next three years is," Labour finance spokesperson Michael Cullen
said today.
"The final details of those numbers will not be settled until we have seen the Pre-Election Fiscal Update."
Dr Cullen was commenting on an Infometrics report commissioned by the Chamber of Commerce which purports to measure the
fiscal impacts of a Labour Government.
"There is a phrase in statistics which is called "gigo" - garbage in, garbage out.
"Feed in small errors at the start and you get very large errors out the other end after a relatively short period of
time.
"The model used by Infometrics seems to assume that higher spending will necessarily result in reduced growth and,
having assumed that, then produces that result. There is no empirical evidence to justify this. It is simply an
ideological preconception of Infometrics and the Auckland Chamber of Commerce.
"The Chamber could have saved itself a lot of money if it had simply stated in one line what we already know. Because of
the Employment Contracts Act and one or two other matters, they would like to see a National-Act Government," Dr Cullen
said.