As Joe Hockey retires from politics and moves to a coveted diplomatic role in Washington, his name will not roll into the annals of history alongside the powerful prime minister and treasurer partnerships of recent decades: the Hawke-Keating and Howard-Costello duos. Instead his tenure will be likened to a blip as Australia moves to recover from two unfortunate years of wasted potential – years in which business and consumer confidence plunged, unemployment rose, and the Reserve Bank was spurred into warning about a "chronic pessimism" taking root.

Of course, that is not how Mr Hockey would like to be remembered, but his confidence in his abilities outweighs his record. He would prefer Australians viewed his two years as treasurer as a triumph of sorts; that on matters relating to the economy and jobs creation, the Abbott government did well. He contends that the Abbott government fumbled only the politics, not the policies. But that is a falsehood. Had the Abbott government's policies succeeded, Tony Abbott would still be prime minister and Mr Hockey would still be treasurer. It was not merely that the Abbott government's policies were poorly promoted to voters or that some failed to pass the Senate. Many – especially on welfare, unemployment and jobs creation – were ill-considered, half-baked and inequitable, or served to alienate or demonise elements of our community while entrenching divides between rich and poor.

Mr Hockey's hectoring style did not help. Rather than explaining why particular policies might yield solutions to complex problems, he spouted trite and alarmist slogans, repeatedly claiming Australia was facing a "debt and deficit disaster" and a "budget emergency". He divided the nation into "lifters and leaners", a patronising summation that implied welfare recipients were somehow unworthy or dragged down the wealth prospects of everybody else.

He claims the 24-hour cycle of the modern media and the centuries-old Westminster system of Parliament combine to make it "difficult to examine and debate policy issues in a measured and considered way". That is rich, coming from Mr Hockey. It was his job to communicate policy, irrespective of how the media operates or how parliamentary debates proceed. Yet he rarely made a cogent or satisfying argument about how and why the government's policies might work.