By Peter Hartcher
Joe Hockey is making a commendable effort to be a serious figure in Australian politics. The pink fairy tutu he wore on TV didn't help. Actually, he didn't wear it, so much as clutch over his groin and sway his hips self-consciously while waving a wand in a game of charades.
It gave Wayne Swan the opening to call him "a giant Tinkerbell". But it's a small matter in the scheme of things. Joe Hockey's two biggest handicaps are the blokes on either side of him in the Coalition's economic team. And he's handcuffed to them.
Hockey is the shadow treasurer. That means he's the principal economics spokesman and policy maker for the Coalition. It's a very big job but he wants to be more. He wants, one day, to be the leader of his party and the prime minister of his country.
So it's an irreducible minimum, for his current job and for his future hopes, that he has credibility on the economy and tax. It's vital for the Opposition too, if is to have any chance of unseating Kevin Rudd and Wayne Swan at this year's election.
But his leader, Tony Abbott, and the Opposition's finance spokesman, Barnaby Joyce, commit incendiary acts of economic stupidity so often that Hockey feels as if he has to go to sleep with a fire extinguisher next to his bed to be ready for the next emergency.
Hockey has a few things going for him and he's done a few things right. He has more ministerial experience and more economic knowledge than Paul Keating or Peter Costello or Wayne Swan had when first appointed treasurer.
He cuts a likeable figure; he was ranked as the preferred Liberal leader the last time the question was polled, which was last year, just as Malcolm Turnbull's leadership was collapsing. And, at crucial moments, he's asserted himself successfully in the Coalition's inner councils.
One high-stakes moment came when the Rudd government proposed its second package of economic stimulus spending. The Coalition had voted in favour of the first but now the shadow cabinet was divided over the second. It was, at $42 billion, big.
The shadow treasurer, Julie Bishop, surprisingly, brought no recommendation to the shadow cabinet on how the Coalition should vote on it. Nick Minchin and Christopher Pyne argued forcefully that the Coalition should support the government plan. It would be too popular, they argued, for the Coalition to vote against new school halls and cash handouts. The Coalition would be crushed politically if it stood in the way.
Hockey argued against, with Peter Dutton and Steve Ciobo. It was too much spending and too much debt. "If we don't stand against this sort of spending, we don't stand for anything," was Hockey's line. His view prevailed. The Opposition position was that some stimulus was justified but only half as much as the government proposed.
That allowed the opposition to wage a credible campaign against the government's debt and deficit. It also gave the opposition the authority to campaign against components of the stimulus bills, such as the government's ceiling insulation program.
And the campaign against debt and deficit and excessive spending, in turn, positioned the Coalition to accomplish something of a coup. Against Rudd and without Peter Costello, the Coalition had lost its crown as the party perceived to be the better economic manager. Polls this year show that the Coalition has won this important title back again.
It's a remarkable feat - the Government's stimulus strategy has been one of the main factors holding Australia's economy up out of recession. Yet, under opposition criticism of debt and deficit, the government's economic reputation has fallen into second position - that is, the losing position.
Hockey - seeking to position himself as a serious thinker and leadership candidate, not just another politician spinning his way around the news cycle - has given a pair of considered speeches in the past four months. First came "In Defence of God" in November. On Thursday night he delivered "In Defence of Liberty". It was a thoughtful speech that searched for the dividing line where the liberty of the individual citizen needs to be constrained in the interests of the collective good.
Hockey comes down against a range of intrusions of the state into the right to personal freedom. He opposes expanded police powers to allow random body searches in Western Australia, attempts to raise the legal drinking age, networks of closed circuit TV cameras and the Rudd Government's plan to censor the internet.
This will be contentious in the Coalition ranks, where there is a push to support the government plan. But Hockey says: "I have personal responsibility as a parent. If I want to stop my children from viewing other material that I feel is inappropriate then that is my responsibility to do something about it - not that of the government.
"What we have in the government's internet filtering proposals is a scheme that is likely to be unworkable in practice. But more perniciously it is a scheme that will create the infrastructure for government censorship on a broader scale."
Hockey is also uncomfortable with the draconian measures in the counter-terrorism law enacted by the Howard government, of which Hockey, of course, was part. He wants them to be reviewed earlier than the 10 years specified in the law itself.
But on liberty, Hockey draws the line at violent video games: "What concerns me about these games is that they, at the most benign end, make us immune to violence or, worse still, encourage us to think of violence as a legitimate tool. Fundamentally, the loss of respect for human life and dignity that these games encourage becomes a threat to the respect we have for individual liberty."
His punchline is the Jefferson-esque "the price of liberty is eternal vigilance". His more urgent problem seems to be that the price of the Coalition's economic credibility is eternal vigilance.
As he works on his political philosophy, his colleagues Abbott and Joyce find new and surprising ways to undermine their own credentials as a party that can be trusted to manage the national economy.
First it was Joyce's Chicken Little routine. The sky was falling, he told us hysterically, and Australia was in danger of defaulting on its sovereign debt. This is with the net federal debt at about 10 per cent of GDP. In the US, Japan and Britain, in comparison, debt approaches or exceeds 100 per cent of GDP. In the Great Depression, Australian federal debt peaked at 129 per cent of GDP. Hockey had to restore sanity by repudiating this hysteria.
Then it was Abbott's extraordinary claim that New Zealand should be some sort of economic model for Australia. NZ has not only suffered a sharp recession where Australia did not, but its per capita income has fallen a troubling 30 per cent behind Australia's. Its long-term national goal, proposed by its conservative leader, John Key, is to try to catch up with us. Hockey had to front the media to extinguish this.
Then Joyce, ranting about the deficit, invented "net gross debt". Well, it can be net, or it can be gross, but it can't be both. Hockey had to disown this one, too.
This week it was Abbott's turn to be the loose cannon. He didn't consult many of his colleagues over his proposal for a 1.7 per cent extra tax on companies with taxable income above $5 million in order to pay for his plan to give six months' parental leave. But he did phone Joe Hockey. We have to assume Hockey has enough economic literacy and political sanity to try to talk Abbott out of this. If he tried, he failed.
Paid maternal leave is an excellent idea, long overdue. But if the Rudd government can construct a way of doing it that will cost $260 million a year, why does Abbott need one that costs not twice or three times as much, but 10 times as much, at $2.7 billion a year?
And an ad hoc extra impost on companies? It took a generation of hard work by both parties to get Australia's corporate tax rate down from 49 per cent to an internationally competitive level, today 30 per cent. Now Abbott wants to start unwinding this achievement in a thoroughly slap-happy manner, eroding Australia's international competitiveness in pursuit of a new policy enthusiasm.
The federal budget this year will spend more than a third of a trillion dollars. If Abbott and Hockey are determined to introduce a wildly expensive maternity leave program, surely they can find offsetting savings of $2.7 billion to pay for it without taxing the wealth generators and job creators of Australia? And the politics of promising to impose a new tax in an election year adds political idiocy to economic vandalism.
It was a bad idea of Abbott's and it was a failing of Hockey's to allow him to announce it. Hockey's job as the guardian of economic credibility is to kill bad ideas before they can become policy.
If Hockey has pretensions to economic credibility, if he wants to make the Coalition electable, he has to do better. Of course, a little good sense from Abbott and Joyce wouldn't hurt either. Hockey needs to remind himself - the price of credibility is eternal vigilance.
Peter Hartcher is the Herald's political editor.