http://www.afr.com/p/national/the_abbott_and_hockey_show_lots_d2M445VWC1WPxBwUMa...

Before the names came to suggest leadership rivalries, they meant great political partnerships between prime minister and treasurer, not always in complete agreement but heading in the same direction.

Now we have Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey. While those around them insist it is a great partnership and that the two men speak often, the differences in their public utterances of late have heightened a problem for the government. Its actions are increasingly being seen through the prism of a split between the two most powerful men in the country.

Hockey had gone to some pains a few weeks ago to clear the way for Qantas to be an exception to the new tough love rules of no government support for ailing businesses. Last week, Abbott cut its debt guarantee off at the knees on the day the airline announced its results and that it was laying off 5000 workers.

His comments shocked Qantas and the markets and, perhaps as significantly, left many in the business ­community wondering whether they could rely on signals from the Treasurer in future. The fact Qantas believed it had received assurances direct from Abbott got lost in the maelstrom.

Similarly, Hockey has been escalating the tough budget talk in the past few weeks, trying to prepare the ground for his first budget, getting into specifics such as cutting Medicare and the age pension. The Treasurer is the one who has put flesh on the bones of the prime minister’s ambition to be an “infrastructure prime minister”, reshaping the political debate about privatisation, talking about assisting state government to recycle funds from existing public assets via privatisation.

He has been leaving open as many options as possible on spending cuts, even as other colleagues have been closing them down.

But the Prime Minister has been much more cautious about the budget.

Abbott was only prepared to hint last week at a cut in health and education spending down the track, while emphasising the government would keep its election promises. Still, his office was alarmed when newspapers quite understandably reported he was signalling the government would go to the next election promising the cuts as part of the government’s long-term strategy to balance the budget.

Finally, when The Australian Financial Review reported last week that the Commission of Audit (still to be published) was less than impressed with Abbott’s paid parental leave scheme, the presumption all over Canberra was that Hockey had leaked the story.

Journalists opined knowingly on social media to this effect.

Hockey in the past has rationalised Abbott’s parental leave scheme on the basis there would be cuts found to fund it. But with widespread hostility to the scheme in the Coalition and the ­business community, people are now relying on the Treasurer to kill it off, forgetting perhaps that the Senate will probably do the job anyway.

Rumblings have also emerged within the Coalition about differences between the two men and have spilled over into the business community.

TWO SCHOOLS OF THOUGHT
It is notable that there are two equally strongly held but opposite views about what is going on.

One view is that Hockey has been doing the hard yards of establishing a coherent economic narrative for the government, while Abbott takes pragmatic but erratic policy decisions which undermine the narrative.

Others argue Hockey is a blowhard who hasn’t done anything yet, and who has got the government into all sorts of trouble by imposing an unwieldy “age of entitlement” narrative that is ­politically impractical. They say it is the prime minister who makes the hard calls.

The issue has been made all the more complicated by the existence of the ­so-called “Hockey club” of junior frontbenchers and backbenchers who have aligned themselves to the Treasurer.

It is further complicated by the ­ongoing resentment in the Coalition of Abbott’s failure to promote new blood after the election and the control the prime minister’s office seeks to exert over ministers.

Add to that the always-present ­tension with Coalition partners the Nationals and the story is always going to be complicated. In this case, it is increasingly personalised as a split between the prime minister who must appease “the Nats” and his Treasurer.

The Nationals came into play in the Qantas story.

Some who were close to manoeuvres believe the Nationals and former National MP, now Rex chairman John Sharp, may have helped torpedo the debt guarantee, anxious that a ­revitalised Qantas may have moved in on the airline’s remaining profitable routes.

Whatever differences exist are only going to come into sharper focus in the next month or two. The Commission of Audit along with the G20 finance ministers’ meeting have slowed down the preparations for the first Hockey budget.

The expenditure review committee of cabinet is only getting down to intense work this month, very late in the cycle for the gargantuan task of preparing a crucial first budget.

The government will not even receive the second report of the Commission of Audit for another month.

Bureaucrats are already exhausted because they have been working for months trying to anticipate any requests for policy overhauls, rather than necessarily working in a more specifically directed fashion.

I's heard rumours it will be a flying camel toe painted on every tail.

____ wrote on Mar 4^th, 2014 at 4:44pm:


That'd make it a pussy of an airline.....

adelcrow wrote on Mar 4^th, 2014 at 4:29pm:


Given that only Hockey's paternal grandmother was Palestinian, wouldn't his heritage be more Armenian than Palestinian?  And I don't think you could call Armenians Arabs....

While the quoted article is a little speculative, it does suggest that there may be a resurgence of the "wets" versus "dries" battles within the Liberal party, or a similar ideological battle.