Looking more amateur hour by the minute! still waiting for the Adults to take over are we?
"More performances like this and Joe Hockey will send confidence backwards"
"Joe Hockey looked like the dog that caught the car at his first press conference as Treasurer. His expression oscillated between bewilderment and annoyance, as he went dangerously close to complaining about having too full a "dance card", and being forced to spend too much time in the capital. Tell it to Wayne Swan one was tempted to say - the poor sod seemed to be always in Canberra slaving thanklessly over the numbers, doing the hard grunt work of budget preparation and fiscal management."
"Questions came from all angles, touching on Hockey's fractious relationship with Treasury - its head, Martin Parkinson, will leave after the next budget; the true state of the budget now; the current state of the economy and any threats to it; his views on the US Fed's stimulus tapering; the risks of a housing bubble as cautioned by our own RBA: his thoughts on inflation; an so on. His answers were a study in non-answering - even on the broad macro-economic challenges. The kind version is that Hockey's vagueness was deliberate - part of a whole of government strategy right now to say as little as possible. But to be frank, it felt more like something else. Like perhaps a government that has not yet made the pyschological transition to office."
"So it was surprising that he cast a slur his own department by slamming the revenue projections from the former government's announced tightening of the Fringe Benefits Tax treatment of privately leased cars. The numbers had come straight from Treasury - as recently as July. Is the Treasurer really saying the people who are now his senior departmental officials bodgied up the numbers for political purposes?"
