When Australia's political historians look back at 2014, they will see it as a year defined by its May budget.
Economic policy dominates everything. Apart from elections, budgets are the focus of the Canberra calendar — the pivot on which governments turn.
Yet even by those standards, this year's budget was truly epic. Eight months later, it lingers over everything.
For sheer political significance, it is on par with Arthur Fadden's 1951 "horror budget", which boosted taxes, crashed the economy, and nearly cost the Menzies government the 1954 election.
Fadden said after his budget, "I could have had a meeting of all my friends and supporters in a one-man telephone booth." Poor old Joe Hockey must sympathise.
But today Fadden's horror budget is remembered more fondly — particularly by the Commonwealth Treasury — as it broke the back of the Korean War inflation. A decade of prosperity followed.
So the question is whether Hockey's budget will look like temporary political pain for future gain, as the 1951 budget was, or a tragically missed opportunity for needed reform.
Put aside, for a moment, the argy-bargy over the budget details and its mixed messages. The sad fact is that the budget exposed how the political class does not have a directed vision for the future of Australia.
It showed that neither side of politics really has any idea of how to lift the economy out of its slow but steady decline. Neither side has any real idea of what Australia ought to look like in 10, 20 or 30 years.
To be fair to the Coalition, governments reflect the times. They do not create them.
Fadden's 1951 budget was the first counter-inflationary budget inspired by John Maynard Keynes. No doubt if Labor were in power it would have had almost exactly the same horror budget.
Likewise, it's fun to mythologise the great economic reforms of Bob Hawke and Paul Keating but Hawke and Keating were only doing what was also being done around the world. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher did the same stuff, in much the same way. So did many other leaders, from New Zealand to Sweden.
Even the vision of Gough Whitlam, who died in October, was not unique. He was a man of his times. The new biography of Dick Hamer by Tim Colebatch emphasises how much policy affinity there was between the Liberal Hamer and Whitlam. Harold Holt's biographer, Tom Frame also claims Holt practised Whitlamism before Whitlam did.
Economic vision does not come from the people in charge, or even the governments in power. It comes from the zeitgeist.
In Parliament, Labor and the Coalition hurl insults at each other as if that was the most important thing in the world. Yet, in government, both are advised by the same bureaucrats offering variations of the same ideas. That's the essence of the Westminster system. On the upside, this system ensures continuity of government. On the downside, it enforces policy conformity. And it can create a serious problem: what happens when the public service does not know what to do next?
That conformity is why Hockey's long-term economic strategy looks a lot like Wayne Swan's economic strategy. The idea is to control spending at the margins, but, for the most part, hope that the economy will grow its way out of trouble. But the Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook, released a fortnight ago, confirmed Hockey's forecasts have been just as optimistic as Swan's.
Yes, Prime Minister Tony Abbott has reshuffled the top echelons of the public service. There is a new Treasury secretary and new secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet. Yet those top executives are themselves being fed the same advice their predecessors were.
It is not that the two major parties are Tweedledum and Tweedledee. They profess strikingly different ideologies. Yet, in government, they are constrained by the policy ideas available and the advice they receive.
Labor supporters might object here that there's no way their party would implement a budget as deeply unfair as the Abbott government's. Yet, it was the Hawke government that reintroduced university fees and first proposed a medical co-payment.
Nothing in the 2014 budget was beyond the pale. It was all within the normal range.
Of course, the opposition has an interest in pretending otherwise. This has been a great year for Labor for the simple reason that the party has not been in a debilitating state of civil war. High poll numbers are a bonus. No wonder Opposition Leader Bill Shorten looks chuffed.
Shorten says 2014 was a year of "unity and resistance" and 2015 will be the "year of ideas".
Let's hope so. Truth is we know less of Shorten's plans than we did of Abbott's in his first year as opposition leader. Back then, it was clear the Coalition wanted to repeal the carbon tax, stop the boats, and introduce paid parental leave. Abbott's problem is that his agenda was never developed much further. Yet, it was still more substantial than what Labor offers now.
In his press conference announcing the reshuffle last weekend, Abbott said the new cabinet was all about "jobs and families". The economy would be "front and centre" in 2015.
But it always is. The real question for 2015 is whether the government's advisers have any new ideas to boost economic growth.
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