Yes, the appropriations bills have passed, but the lack of urgency stands in stark contrast to the rhetoric up until now

That screeching sound is the government’s budget rhetoric doing a u-turn.

Having spent the last three months insisting the budget emergency meant there would be dire consequences if the budget did not pass, it appears the government is now facing the reality that key budget policies may indeed not pass – despite its best negotiating efforts over the winter break.

Lest anyone then try to assert that by the government’s own arguments we were facing some kind of emergency or crisis, the government has dramatically shifted its rhetoric, insisting there is in fact no crisis or emergency at all.

“Most of the budget has passed through the parliament, but we are now dealing with some of the structural challenges, and we are working on the structural responses,” says treasurer Joe Hockey.

“A number of the measures that are the subject of the most intensive post-budget debate are not due to take effect for some time … there is ample time to keep engaging with the Senate crossbenchers.” says finance minister Mathias Cormann.

“No government in recent political history had passed all of its budget measures through both houses of parliament by the end of August.”

In economic terms, what the treasurer and finance ministers are saying is true. We won’t face any sort of crisis if the budget does not pass straight away. But the lack of urgency does stand in stark contrast to what the government has been saying up until the past few days.

Back in May, the prime minister was saying, “we cannot go on as a nation in a fool’s paradise thinking that we can pay our mortgage on the credit card. We just can’t continue to do this. This government is determined to start the clean-up as quickly as possible and that’s what this budget was all about”.

Or “everyone in this room who has ever had a mortgage, who has ever had a credit card, knows that eventually if you let it get out of control you don’t run the debt – the debt runs you. And that’s the problem. That’s the budget emergency that has been confronting our country. Labor was incapable of facing up to it – the Coalition, as before, will once more rise to the challenge of addressing the nation’s finances.”

The likely fate of the budget in the Senate was so alarming the government was warning of a “Queensland style austerity budget” or finding the same savings in ways that did not need to be legislated.

As independent senator Nick Xenophon said “this message is getting very confused … a few weeks ago we were led to believe the budget was on life support, now we find out it’s kicking back on a banana lounge on Hayman Island.”

Also not really passing muster is the new argument that there is no reason to worry because the budget is already two thirds through the Senate, given that the appropriations bills – which have passed – contained 400 decisions with a net improvement to the bottom line of nearly $40bn over the next four years.

If the appropriations bills had been blocked there really would have been a crisis, but their passage is not usually cause for a government to be giving itself high-fives.

The truth is, as it has always been, that the budget does need “repair” over the medium term. Many of the particular choices and decisions taken by the Abbott government to try to repair it are likely to be blocked in the Senate. The government’s attempts to bully those measures through with claims of an immediate crisis did not work and its attempts to negotiate them through over the winter break appear to have made only minimal headway.

The new strategy appears to be to claim that having much of its program blocked in the Senate doesn’t immediately matter. Crisis, what crisis?