The treasurer's intransigence on the leave policy will make it harder to convince people the pain is being spread fairly

The extent to which Australians cop the “heavy lifting” in Joe Hockey’s first budget will depend entirely on whether they think the effort is fairly spread around.



But a table in the middle of the treasurer’s latest softening-up speech clearly displayed a policy that is going to make it much harder for the Coalition to convince voters there really has been an equitable distribution of budget pain.

Explaining the structural problems with the budget, Hockey detailed how the 15 largest areas of government spending are also the fastest growing.

The fastest of all, measured in average annual growth over the next 10 years is the national disability insurance scheme, a new scheme starting the decade with almost no expenditure at all.

The second fastest is not the aged pension, or hospitals, or any of the sectors usually nominated as unsustainable, but a category called “childcare and paid parental leave” which increases on average by 11.5% over the decade.

Despite this rapid growth in expenditure, clearly fuelled by the Coalition’s generous expansion of the paid parental leave scheme, later in the speech Hockey insisted it was one thing the Coalition would definitely not be cutting, on the grounds it “will help women to remain engaged with their employer [and] lift female workforce participation”.

This directly contradicts the productivity commission’s finding that schemes such as the Coalition’s that promise “full replacement wages for highly educated, well-paid women, would be very costly for taxpayers and, given their high level of attachment to the labour force and a high level of private provision of paid parental leave, would have few incremental labour supply benefits”.

And in the everyday world, the idea that already well-off women can get $75,000 for six months at home with their baby will be the fairness benchmark against which every other budget cut is compared.

The budget debate will be all about choices – about who bears the pain and who is spared. It will also be about promises. Tony Abbott explicitly ruled out cuts to pensions, education, health, education and unexpected changes to superannuation – although it may well turn out some of those promises had a previously-unclear restricted timeframe.

But the expensive paid parental leave promise, which the government seems so determined to keep, is set to make so many of its other choices more difficult to explain.