Can you believe it? The truth according to Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey

Post-truth politics has just entered a whole new orbit. I’ve written before about how political debate seems increasingly unhitched from a normal, factual understanding of the concept of truth. But in defending its 2014 budget the Coalition has finally severed the link entirely, with truthfulness and lying becoming just another question of strategy.

The fact that the budget breaks pre-election promises about not raising taxes and not cutting funding for health, education, pensions and the ABC is really beyond dispute in most people’s understanding of truthfulness.

But Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey keep insisting the opposite – using a variety of “dog ate my homework” excuses, usually inserting previously invisible definitions, provisos and fine print. These include the claim that “no new taxes” actually meant no increase in the overall level of taxation compared with the previous year and therefore increases in personal income tax and fuel tax and medical costs don’t count, that “we are on a unity ticket on Gonski” meant four years of funding and then absolutely no more “full stop” so the states should have expected billions would be cut and that the Medicare co-payment doesn’t count because the money will be used for research.

They are also pleading ameliorating circumstances – that they had to do these things in order to keep the “overriding” promise to “repair” the budget – and that they are reaping “no personal gain” in that the broken promises aren’t likely to win them many supporters.

Most astonishingly for a political party that spent four years running around the country hyperventilating and exaggerating about the impact of the former government’s carbon pricing policy, and denouncing it on the grounds that it was based on a “lie”, Abbott and Hockey are now dismissing discussion of their own broken promises by saying they are just “political” attacks rather than criticisms of the budget’s “policy”.

It is true that the budget’s “policy” should be analysed, and it will be. But that shouldn’t mean blatantly misleading voters can be “swept aside” as some commentators are suggesting.

And there are some circumstances, I think, in which politicians should be given leeway to change their policy commitments in the light of changed circumstances.

Our ABC colleague Lyndal Curtis has written a thoughtful piece on the role of the media in the whole “truth and lies” debate, because of the way we demand immediate answers, refuse to countenance changed circumstances and find it hard to leave room for healthy internal debate and disagreement in the political process.

But in this case the changed circumstances are largely confected. The state of the budget – which does definitely require medium-term structural changes to taxes and spending – was known before the election.

The Coalition did take some decisions (like promising to axe the schoolkids’ bonus) and make some statements (like Joe Hockey’s ending the age of entitlement) that indicated post-election funding would have to be restrained.

But it also, quite deliberately, gave voters the clear impression that pensions, healthcare and education spending were safe.

And it is now, again quite deliberately, breaking those promises while pretending that it isn’t and hoping that, in the fury of budget reaction, it will bluff its way through.

The extent of the calculation is canvassed in a column in The Australian by former Liberal staffer Niki Savva, who says that “before the budget, ministers canvassed the option of the prime minister apologising for the pain and, by implication, for the broken promises”. But she said that strategy was shelved, and instead the now-employed strategy of saying it was all “fundamentally honest” or “faithful to the commitments” was decided upon.

Truth has become just another question of tactics.