The government promises courteous negotiations while threatening dire consequences should talks not go its way

The government’s budget sales pitch appears to have moved into a passive aggressive phase.



It began with the “budget emergency” – the repeated insistence that the need to repair the budget bottom line was so dire and immediate that the Senate had no choice but to immediately pass exactly this package of spending cuts and revenue increases.



That didn’t work because even those senators who accept that there is a serious need to rein in spending in the medium term did not accept that the budget represented the only way to do it, or that it represented a fair way to achieve that end.



Then came the culinary charm offensive over the winter break, when treasurer Joe Hockey and other ministers met, and often dined, with Clive Palmer and other crossbench senators to argue the merits of particular initiatives.



Those negotiations remain a work in progress, but the public pronouncements from the opposition parties and crossbenchers would not give rise to enormous confidence from the government’s point of view.



And so we enter the passive aggressive phase, where on the one hand the government promises to “carefully, courteously and patiently” negotiate over the budget (in the words of the prime minister) but on the other hand it makes all kinds of threats about the consequences should those talks not go its way.



Christopher Pyne was out on the weekend threatening cuts to research funding. If the aim of his portfolio reforms is to improve the standing of Australian universities in international league tables, which are based heavily on research and research citations, why on earth would he want to do that? And if the aim of the whole budget is to lay the groundwork for future economic growth, how could it make sense to cut one of the main endeavours that drives it?



And Mathias Cormann was threatening future tax hikes as the only possible alternative should these spending cuts fail. If the government is shooting for higher business and individual productivity, it is hard to see how that makes sense. Meanwhile, Hockey mutters about a “Queensland-style” austerity budget.



Of course another alternative would be to consider a different combination of spending cuts, with a fairer distribution of economic pain.

