Joe Hockey has released an authorised biography, presumably to further his own leadership ambitions and it’s got some interesting stuff in it. From the AFR:
“In reality, the budget was much softer than Joe would have liked,’’ says the book by Madonna King, Hockey: Not Your Average Joe.
“He wanted changes to pensions made earlier and the deficit levy to net more taxpayers.
“But Abbott, who chaired each of the expenditure review committee meetings, was taking a much more cautious approach than his Treasurer, no doubt with one eye firmly on the reaction of voters.”
…And his view on the deficit levy, which was a 2 percentage point increase in income tax on incomes over $180,000, explaining earlier reports that the tax hike would cut in at $80,000.
Again, it was Mr Abbott who pushed to increase the threshold.
The pension change and lower income threshold should both of been adopted and would have helped offset (though not prevented) some of the political backlash, which has been about the fairness of the cuts, not the cuts themselves. Weirdly enough, the AFR and the book represent not installing these measures as squibbing a tougher line when in fact they would have been the opposite given the greater perception of fairness.
But if it was so important to fix the Budget then why propose the monster medical fund at the last minute?
The reports on Joe Hockey’s book suggest that both the PM and Treasurer have questionable commitment to their most vociferously espoused values and tin ears both.
As John Howard has hinted at, we needed a tough Budget that distributed cuts fairly so people followed it. It’s wasn’t rocket science though was made to look like it.
