Joe Hockey's first budget is a bit like John Howard's Work Choices: it's a solution to a problem the public doesn't think exists.
There's a view that Hockey should have had a mini-budget within weeks of the federal election in September last year. The argument is that leaving the budget until May sent the message that the government's financial situation is neither serious nor urgent — that there's no budget "emergency".
In fact, one of the reasons the budget is in trouble is not that it was delivered too late, but rather that it was delivered too soon.
The Australian public have had two decades of an economic boom, six years of a profligate Labor government, and a year of being told by the Coalition when it was in opposition that the country could afford Labor's promises of huge increases in spending on education, health, and disability services. After years of being told they can have all this — and more, voters were then told by Hockey on budget night on May 13 that they can't.
It's no surprise the budget has hit a brick wall in Parliament and with voters. Not even Paul Keating and Peter Costello appearing on stage together at RSL Clubs around the country could sell this budget.
One of two conditions are required if the public is to accept the sort of budget Hockey delivered. Neither of them exists at the moment. The first is a clear and obvious crisis, say a recession; the second is a process of communication over the long term. With a bit of luck the country won't have a recession, so what's left for the government is communication.
To say the communication about the budget has been a mess is now a truism of Australian politics.
It's not enough for Hockey to go to London and give one excellent speech about the end of the age of entitlement. He's got to give that same speech every day in Australia.
TIMEWASTING AT B20 AND G20
In the current political environment Tony Abbott and Hockey are wasting their time at cocktail parties for the G20, the B20, and the collection of acronyms that are the international government/finance circus.
The Coalition inherited the G20 meeting and it has to go ahead, but the difference that anything talked about at the G20 will make to the average voter is zero.
The government also has to realise that it's not going to get too much help from anyone else in selling its message. Most economists in business, academia and the public service like higher government spending and think Australians are not taxed enough. Many of those same economists thought the carbon tax and the mining tax were good ideas. Those economists are only too willing to point out that for every argument the government makes there's a counter-argument.
For example the public are told (correctly) that Australia has nearly the fastest growing government debt in the developed world. But they're also told (correctly) that the country's debt is not as bad as the rest of the world. (Apparently Australians find being it comforting to be told we're not as bad as Europe or America.)
The Coalition misunderstood the public. The Coalition believed that given the failings of the Rudd/Gillard/Rudd administrations the public would be more accommodating of the Coalition than it's been willing to be. Saying "We're not Labor" and "We'll fix it" is not enough to get the public on side. Rudd and Gillard have salted the earth for a generation. The public are now distrustful and wary of all governments of all persuasions. Of itself this is no bad thing. The public should trust government less, not more. But it does mean the task of the government getting the public to support its policies is made more difficult.
The question is where the government goes from here. The answer is obvious, but doing it is hard. The government and its ministers and its backbenchers have to knuckle down and do the hard slog of every day between now and the next federal election explaining why, if we are to maintain our standard of living, let alone improve it, things in Australia must change.
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