The Abbott government is standing by those measures from its last budget that remain stuck in the Senate, Treasurer Joe Hockey says.

CHANGES to the GST are off the table so long as the states remain hostile to the idea, Treasurer Joe Hockey says.

Speaking this morning Mr Hockey said there was “no point” attempting to make changes to the Goods and Services Tax and how it was distributed if it was just going to be blocked.

“If you can’t deliver it, there is no point in proposing it in this environment,” Mr Hockey told Sky News’s Australian Agenda.

“If you are going to put up a proposal that is going to hit a brick wall why would you go through the angst of putting up any proposal?”

Mr Hockey’s comments come despite the Commonwealth Grants Commission being asked to consider how to better distribute the GST. It reported back to the Treasurer last month.

The Treasurer also conceded this morning that the Coalition had attempted to do too much in last year’s widely unpopular federal budget.

“Last year we tried to deliver one budget that solved 40 years of potential problems. That was too much, we accept that,” he said.

But Mr Hockey said if we wanted to future-proof the nation, hard decisions needed to be made, flagging another savings-focused budget in May.

“The status quo is not an option,” Mr Hockey said.

“If we do not live within our means now then the future is going to be far tougher for ourselves and our children.”

Mr Hockey said the government would stand by its current measures locked up in the Senate, despite their unpopularity.

But he has fallen short of saying whether the government would go to a double dissolution into pursuit of them.

“That’s not for me to call, but it is clearly unacceptable to only have one side of politics offering a plan for Australia’s future and the other side of politics just saying ‘no’ to everything,” Mr Hockey said.

He said the intergenerational report — released last week — was actually a positive document, and while it forecast that the budget would return to surplus if the Coalition’s tough reform agenda was passed, that was assuming 40 more years of growth.

“We are assuming 64 years of continuous economic growth,” he said.

But Mr Hockey said increasing taxes to balance the nation’s finances was not the way to go.

“We can’t surf back to surplus on increasing taxes. Even the highest level of revenue collection goes nowhere near covering the locked in expenditure,” he said.

“I want to reduce taxes because you can never tax your way to prosperity.”

However Mr Hockey said in the current fiscal environment significantly lowering the tax burden for families and businesses that was simply not possible.

“We do not have the leeway for those significant tax cuts in the current environment which is all the more reason why we need to reduce the expenditure trajectory,” he said.