Tony Abbott seems to have a new budget sales strategy – blame the critics.



On Tuesday he said Labor was acting like “vandals” and “risking Australia’s AAA credit rating” by criticising – and blocking – “$40bn” worth of budget savings measures in the Senate.



First problem: the allegation was based on the headline in that day’s Australian Financial Review, “AAA credit rating at risk”. But an S&P spokesman later told Guardian Australia its long-term view was that Australia had a “stable outlook” and “the rating is not at risk”. When asked if it could be at risk if spending cuts in the 2013-14 budget were blocked in the Senate, he replied: “No … our position has been the same for years, it has not changed.” The bloke from Standard and Poors was actually trying to say that if Australia seemed to think it could run very big budget deficits indefinitely, then in the longer term the rating might be reassessed.



Second problem: the budget papers clearly show (Budget paper number 1: table 6), that the decisions in this budget deliver only $15bn in net savings to the budget bottom line and $5.5bn in extra revenue – that is around $20bn in decisions. (In the budget papers it actually comes out as $18.8bn because some of it counts as capital investment, but let’s not quibble.) The $40bn figure includes about another $5bn in cuts that Labor proposed to help fund its “Gonski” school plan in the longer term, which it now says aren’t needed because the new government isn’t funding the Gonski plan in the longer term, and also programs the government wants to abolish because they were paid for from the carbon and mining taxes.

Labor is voting against a lot of the $20bn – the Medicare co-payment, the changes to unemployment benefit for under-30s, the changes to the pension, the removal of single-income family payments when the youngest child turns six, the deregulation of universities and the re-indexation of fuel excise. The first three appear set to fail in the Senate, the fuel excise indexation may get through with Greens support and the fate of single income benefits and university deregulation are still unclear.



Joe Hockey, on song with the front page of today’s Daily Telegraph, which portrays Bill Shorten sitting at the head of the “national complaints desk” and accuses him of being engaged in “sabotage”, said it was “now time for Bill Shorten to step up to the plate, not become a national complaints desk, and actually offer some constructive alternatives”.



Speaking to the national press club a few hours later shadow treasurer Chris Bowen did, saying that if the government ditched its paid parental leave plan it would save more than all the measures Labor was opposing.



It is true that historically opposition leaders have offered alternative savings to budget measures they vow to block – in 2009, for example, Malcolm Turnbull proposed to raise tobacco excise as an alternative to Labor’s proposed policy of means testing the private health insurance rebate.



But Abbott himself shifted the goalposts on this, responding to the budgets of 2010, 2011 and 2012 with alternative savings to pay for different things he said the Coalition would spend money on, but without savings for Labor’s budget measures he was opposing at the time, like changes to family tax benefits much, much milder than those he is himself now proposing, which, when Labor proposed them, Abbott described as “class warfare”.



Of course any government will challenge an opposition to nominate alternative savings, but the problem for this government is that voters have pretty clear views about the fairness of its own choices – the savings it has chosen (hitting students, pensioners, the sick and the unemployed) and those it has left untouched (superannuation concessions, negative gearing, the new paid parental leave plan) all of which disproportionately benefit the well to do.



And as well as criticising Labor, the government is also criticising premiers complaining about immediate cuts and $80bn in longer term reductions in school and hospital funding, saying they should grow up and take responsibility for the services they run.



Radio announcer Alan Jones was truly bewildered while interviewing Christopher Pyne on Wednesday, astounded that despite the education minister’s “brilliant” advocacy skills the “blockheads” running state governments could not understand that the allegation of an $80bn cut was totally wrong. In fact, Jones said, “there hasn't been a more monstrous lie perpetrated since Julia Gillard said there'd be no carbon tax”.



Pyne somehow neglected to refer Jones to page 7 of the government’s glossy budget overview which clearly states that the government is changing indexation of state grants and “removing funding guarantees for public hospitals. These measures will achieve cumulative savings of over $80bn by 20024-25.”



Nor did Pyne take issue when Jones suggested that the police should respond to the student protesters gathering around the country on Wednesday by “carting these thugs away and locking them up”. Indeed Pyne claims the students are “intent on shutting down democracy in Australia”.

Of course protests should be peaceful. But rather than attacking all its critics – the opposition, the states, the students – the government might do better just trying to explain its budget and the choices it has made.

