Treasurer Joe Hockey has brushed off growing speculation he could be replaced by Malcolm Turnbull, saying things get a "little ratty" at the end of the year.

Mr Hockey believes senior ministers are cross with him because he has the "tough task" of looking for new budget savings.

"We're working on [the mid-year budget update] and these are the sorts of discussions I'm having with colleagues about how they will help deliver savings," he told reporters in Canberra.

"Some of them aren't too happy but we've got to do what's right for the nation.

"Towards the end of the year it gets a little ratty for some."

News Corp has reported there is growing support for Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull to take over the treasury portfolio if the Government begins next year the same way it ended 2014.

But Mr Hockey said he was not worried that his colleagues had given him an ultimatum to improve over the summer.

"Ah, no," Mr Hockey said.

"They do that every summer in one form or another in either opposition or government.

"For a decade-and-a-half, treasurers have been able to write out bigger and bigger cheques for their colleagues, someone had to say, 'Enough, we've got to live within our means'.

"It's fallen on my shoulders."

Mr Hockey was once regarded as one of the Government's best salesmen.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-12-05/hockey-brushes-off-rumours-of-turnbull-takeover/5946198

Scott Morrison is now the most powerful person in the Australian government.

The passage of the migration and maritime powers legislation amendment (resolving the asylum legacy caseload) bill 2014 has given the immigration minister, while he holds that job, unprecedented, unchallengeable, and secret powers to control the lives of asylum seekers.

Previous immigration ministers have decried the burden and the caprice of “playing God” with asylum seekers’ lives, but the government has chosen, instead, to install even greater powers in the office of the minister.

With the Senate’s acquiescence, Scott Morrison has won untrammelled power.

No other minister, not the prime minister, not the foreign minister, not the attorney-general, has the same unchecked control over the lives of other people

http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2014/dec/05/senate-gives-scott-morrison-unchecked-control-over-asylum-seekers-lives

 

... seeing the government’s messages in their original form is helpful in making sense of the end of an astonishingly bad first year, in which the government lost the confidence of the electorate with spectacular severity and speed.

The messages help because they are, quite transparently, neither coherent nor convincing, but rather the spin of a government that seems to have snookered itself.

So here are the morning messages for Friday – crafted as parliament rose for the Christmas break to help Coalition MPs go forth into the summer and convince voters the year has not been chaotic, as it may have appeared on the nightly news, but “rich in performance” and achievements from a government “delivering in spades”. 

The messages can be distilled into the following points, to which I have taken the liberty of adding notes.

The Abbott government’s plan is THE ONLY PLAN to improve economic growth and repair the budget

• Except that it’s not. This is not the only possible plan. The savings in the budget are not the only possible savings the government could have made. When Tony Abbott opened this whole debate soon after the election, before the commission of audit and the budget, many other suggestions were made, and ignored. The Grattan Institute and the Australia Institute, for example, pointed out that changes to the generous treatment of superannuation could deliver big savings over time by reducing benefits flowing largely to the highest income earners. Instead the government announced it would not proceed with a policy of the previous Labor government to impose a tax of 15% on superannuation earnings of more than $100,000 a year. (The government says changing superannuation would be a broken election promise, a curious rationale given its willingness to break so many others.)

read more: http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2014/dec/05/the-coalitions-own-messages-are-neither-coherent-nor-convincing

 

"I wish the Labor Party wasn't in such a feral mood. I wish the Labor Party was taking the kind of view that the Howard opposition took back in the 1980s."

Tony Abbott. Is it me, or is it strange that the PM should skip his own time in opposition as an example, and go back 30 years?

"It is not, despite what Tony Abbott was saying, the barnacles. It's the actual ship, it's the crew, it's the captain."

Opposition Leader Bill Shorten.

 

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/comment/the-fitz-files-is-it-abbott-or-are-we-to-blame-20141206-120tga.html

 

And no, Fitzy... It's not our fault if we demand of our politicians to be a bit more honest... Tony lied like a sociopath in search of a victim before the last election and his government deserves to be blown up for doing stupid things. When Tony Turdy was in opposition, his attitude was more than feral. It was an abomination. He only survived because of the support from the Murdoch press which controls about 70 per cent of the news outlet in this country and manipulates about 90 per cent of it by making other news outlet be scared of the big bad wolf.

Prime Minister Tony Abbott has announced John Fraser will take over as secretary of the Treasury.

Mr Fraser is a former Treasury official and currently the chairman of global investment bank UBS in Australia.

"Mr Fraser brings significant experience in both the public and private sectors to his appointment," Mr Abbott said in a statement.

He will take over from Martin Parkinson, who will leave the role at the end of the year.

"On behalf of the Government, I thank [Dr Parkinson] for his service to Australia and look forward to his further contribution to our country," Mr Abbott said.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-12-08/john-fraser-named-as-new-secretary-of-treasury/5952154

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One has to remember that Tony Turdy SACKED Mr Parkinson for doing a great job... 

read more: 

 

Why Joe Hockey's budget flopped so badly

Ross Gittins 
December 01, 2014

Who could have predicted what a hash a Coalition government would make of its first budget? [Gus did] If Joe Hockey wants to lift his game in 2015, as we must hope he will, there are lessons the government - and its bureaucratic advisers - need to learn.

The first and biggest reason the government is having to modify or abandon so many of its measures is the budget's blatant unfairness. In 40 years of budget-watching I've seen plenty of unfair budgets, but never one as bad as this.

Frankly, you need a mighty lot of unfairness before most people notice. But this one had it all. Make young people wait six months for the dole? Sure. Cut the indexation of the age pension? Sure. Charge people $7 to visit the doctor, and more if they get tests, regardless of how poor they are? Sure.

Charge people up to $42.70 per prescription? Sure. Lumber uni students with hugely increased HECS debts that grow in real terms even when they're earning less than $50,000 a year? Sure.

What distinguished this budget was that even people who weren't greatly affected by its imposts could see how unfair it was to others.
Unfairly sacked Treasury secretary Dr Martin Parkinson is right to remind us we have to accept some hit to our pocket if the government's budget is to get out of structural deficit. But any politician or econocrat who expects to get such public acquiescence to tough measures that aren't seen to be reasonably fair needs to repeat Politics 101.

This is particularly so when a government lacks the numbers in the Senate - as is almost always the case. Without a reasonable degree of support from the electorate, your chances are slim. Especially when you subjected your political opponents to unreasoning opposition when they were in office.

A related lesson is that successful efforts to restore budgets to surplus invariably rely on a combination of spending cuts and tax increases. To cut spending programs while ignoring the "tax expenditures" enjoyed by business and high income-earners, as this government decided to do, is to guarantee your efforts will be blatantly unfair and recognised as such.

Move in on "unsustainable" spending on age pensions while ignoring all the genuinely unsustainable tax breaks on superannuation? Sure. Our promise to the banks not to touch super trumps our promise to voters not to touch the pension. This makes sense?

But a politically stupid degree of unfairness isn't the only reason this budget was such a poor one. Its other big failing was the poor quality of its measures. It sought to improve the budget position not by raising the efficiency and effectiveness of government spending, but simply by cost-shifting: to the sick, the unemployed, to the aged, to university students and, particularly, to the states.

This takes brains?

There are various ways to improve the cost-effectiveness of the pharmaceutical benefits scheme - though this would involve standing up to the foreign drug companies and to chemists - but why not just whack up the already high co-payment?

There are ways to reform the medical benefits scheme - by standing up to specialists - but why not just introduce a new GP co-payment, even though we already have a much higher degree of out-of-pocket payments than most countries?

The claim that introducing a GP co-payment constitutes micro-economic reform because it gets a "price signal" into Medicare lacks credibility. For a start, I don't believe that's the real motive. Who doubts that, once a co-payment is introduced, it won't be regularly increased whenever governments see the need for further cost-shifting?

For another thing, the notion that introducing a price signal would deter wasteful use without any adverse "unintended consequences" is fundamentalist dogma, not modern health economics.

Similarly, the notion that deregulating tuition fees would turn universities into an efficient, price-competitive market with no adverse consequences to speak of is first-years' oversimplification, not evidence-based economics worthy of PhD-qualified econocrats.

I'm not convinced the range of savings options Treasury and Finance offered the government was of much higher quality than the options it picked. This budget was so bad because so little effort was put into making it any better.

I'm starting to fear our governments and their econocrats have got themselves into a vicious circle: because the econocrats can't come up with anything better, they fall back on yet another round of that great Orwellian false economy, the "efficiency dividend".

But the never-ending extraction of what have become inefficiency dividends is robbing the public service of the expertise it needs to come up with budget measures that would actually improve the public sector's efficiency.

Ross Gittins is the economics editor.

http://m.smh.com.au/…/why-joe-hockeys-budget-flopped-so-bad