From Michael Pascoe's pretty accurate take on last night's Q&A debate between Hockey and Bowen:
But ultimately it was the same old routine, leaving the voter with the same old quandary: is it a matter of intellectual dishonesty or an absence of intellect?
Neither Bowen nor Hockey could or was prepared to level with the audience on the nation's looming taxation demands, a failure highlighted by both sides running away from improving the GST. Labor ran further and faster than the Liberals on that score, but the Liberal performance over any “big new tax” other than their own and perpetuating an illusion of a lower tax future has been at least as shameful.
The Coalition has been wildly successful in flogging the government debt horse and Hockey showed no inclination to dismount, never mind that the beast is only one-fifth equine and four-fifths canard. Chris Bowen attempted and failed, like his predecessor, to put the deficit issue in perspective. The pink batts have stuck.
And that was the core of the problem on display last night: a government incapable of standing on the relative success of its fiscal big picture thanks to the focus on failures in detail and looking after some select union mates; an opposition that's so successful in beating up the government's shortcomings that it hasn't had to go beyond sweeping generalisations and the Magic Pudding aspects of Hockeynomics.
Both have finished up abandoning principles and squawking “me too” when the other seems to have a policy that's a vote winner – the Coalition on Gonski, Labor on something as loony as a Northern Territory company tax haven.
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