Having run out of cash after an almighty spending spree, Wayne Swan’s fourth budget is all about the federal government stepping aside to allow the private sector do the heavy lifting.

And for the detail, look no further than the forecast $76 billion of mining capital investment projected for 2011-12, fuelled by the estimated 20% improvement in the terms of trade to new record highs.

Despite Australia sitting on the world’s fourth biggest pile of superannuation, the majority of that astonishing $76 billion will be spent by foreign companies.

The biggest spending consolidated entity will be corporate vehicles controlled by the Chinese government, which has accumulated foreign reserves of more than $US2 trillion.

After a Whitlamesque spendathon, the Gillard government is in no position to compete with this Chinese spending. Indeed, the budget is predicting the government will borrow an additional $33 billion in 2011-12, on top of the $189 billion of bonds currently on issue.

There’s no rest for the wicked. Fresh from unveiling more blowouts in the budget bottom line for this year and next, the Australian Office of Financial Management website reveals it is tendering $600 million of nine-year bonds today, $1.2 billion of treasury notes on Thursday and another $600 million of three-year bonds to close out the week on Friday the 13th.

And all this government borrowing is not making any meaningful dent in Australia’s much-discussed $700 billion infrastructure backlog.

Swan’s first budget in 2008 was all about infrastructure. Anthony Albanese joined Swan at that lock-up press conference to spruik a variety of new infrastructure investment funds that were duly established on January 1, 2009.

So where are they now?

According to the budget papers, The Building Australia Fund currently has $8.6 billion in assets, with all but $1.5 billion spoken for.

The Education Investment Fund has $5.2 billion on deposit with $2.5 billion uncommitted.

And The Health and Hospitals Fund has $4.7 billion in assets but only $500 million remains uncommitted for future budgets.

The Future Fund itself has $74.6 billion in assets as at the end of March, which includes the $18.5 billion set aside for these three funds.

The residual $56.1 billion managed by the Future Fund is nowhere near enough to cover the projected public service superannuation liability of $129.5 billion as at June 30, 2011.

Indeed, this total liability is projected to soar to $147.8 billion by the end of the forward estimates, but there is no corresponding increase in budget contributions to the Future Fund to reflect this ballooning liability.

The original point of the Future Fund was to fully fund public service super. All private employers in Australia have to fully fund super liabilities.

If the Gillard government merely provided enough funding to stabilise the current net unfunded superannuation liability of $73.4 billion, it would not be able to claim a $3.5 billion surplus in 2012-13.

Having the Future Fund fully funded by 2020 is clearly not going to happen and this is a broken Rudd-Swan-Gillard promise that amounts to tens of billions of dollars. If you believe in consistent accounting standards and transparency in financial management, it is a ruse that should not be ignored. Sadly, it was completely missed in today’s media deluge of budget analysis.

In other sneaky tricks to deliver on the surplus promise, a whopping $2 billion has been stripped from the budget’s overall contingency fund.

And if you go to the Asset and Liability Management section of the budget papers, the opening statement reads as follows:

“The Australian government’s balance sheet remains amongst the strongest in the developed world. This is a key reason behind the retention of the Australian Government’s AAA credit rating.”

That’s a strange claim to make when the actual balance sheet or net worth of the federal government is projected to hit a staggering negative $200 billion next year. In Peter Costello’s final budget, there were projections that the feds would have a positive net worth by 2009.

Despite being saddled with more than $200 billion in debt and unfunded superannuation liabilities, most of the Australian states still claim to have substantial positive balance sheets.

This is because they still own various utilities, ports, schools, hospitals and vast tracts of land.

The gross debt position of the federal government may be low by world standards, but it also has sod all assets to speak of because the states do most of the heavy lifting in Australia and the feds have sold off everything that wasn’t bolted down, with the exception of Parliament House, Australia Post and Medibank Private.

The most obvious asset gap in Australia is a genuine sovereign fund such as Singapore, Norway and many of the oil rich countries.

Wouldn’t it have been nice to have a sovereign fund that took equity positions alongside many of these foreign investors who are supplying the $76 billion for resources investment in 2010-11?

Wayne’s Swan’s fourth budget at the top of an extraordinary mining boom is a million miles from that scenario.