Busto?

You have to hand it to CommSec, while they might have deals in place to keep their logo, heads and voices, on TV and radio throughout the day, they never stop thinking of shameless ways to find free publicity and talk up the economy.

I spent a few minutes pursuing CommSec's "State of the States" report this morning, authored by, yes, Craig James. I'll save you hunting this rubbish down, thus lessening the need to pour acid into your eyeballs, but a quick summation would be this: it's one of those reports designed to make everything look amazing and works exceedingly well if you're at, or just coming off, the peaks of a boom decade.

Basically CommSec takes the decade average for economic indicators and compares them against where those indicators currently are. Whatever floats your boat, but it makes for the situation where even if your wheels are currently falling off, if you manage to have some economic indicators currently parked higher than the past decade average, then CommSec can basically say you're kicking arse.

A simple explanation would be this graph:

The laughable situation happened last year where Tasmania hit 1% population growth, as opposed the decade average of 0.6% which led CommSec to say Tasmania was leading the country in population growth and good times were ahead. This leads to predictable result of the local media getting itself in a lather about an awesome economic indicator.

Which is the real game, CommSec knows bozo reporters, or moron wire services, like AAP, who 'pride themselves on the quality of their hard news', are too lazy to cast an eye over any of this. So they end up grabbing some quotes that are related to the local market, getting CommSec's name in the news again and serving absolute garbage up to the public, like... Report rules out recession danger It's an indictment the ABC even feels the need to cover something which is no better than an advertorial, because the economic data inside is useless crap.

And to balance this, you're not going to get reliability when the The Mercury comes up with convoluted reasoning to suggest that Tasmania is at risk of becoming the bankrupt state. Normally I'd be seizing on this type of thing, but taking at look at the statistics, yes Tasmania has the highest ratio of bankruptcies in Australia, however there was a 3.5% rise in the December quarter vs. a year earlier, which was a figure still lower than the Sept quarter - 180 vs. 178.

And the measure between the 2009 and 2010 quarters?

Down 20.7% between the 2009 and 2010 September quarters. And coming off that 20.7% decline, up 3.5% between the 2009 and 2010 December quarters. Yep, on the verge of being the bankrupt state.

I know who really deserves the arse out of their pants, and it's not the average Tasmanian.