The political experts don't seem to have noticed how successfully Joe Hockey has outfoxed Chris Bowen and Kevin Rudd on the questions of budget promises and perceptions of economic competence.
Hockey's fast footwork achieved its most dramatic success on Friday when Labor re-nailed itself to the cross of a Treasury budget projection almost four years into an unknowable future only a few months after Wayne Swan and Julia Gillard had so painfully torn themselves down from the selfsame cross.
And to give this triumph of hope over experience some shred of credibility, Bowen and Rudd thought it best to announce spending cuts and tax increases worth a net $10 billion over two years just a few days before the start of an election campaign.
Most of those political nasties don't really bite for at least two years but, never mind, take the political pain now.
Would Labor have done something so politically costly - and economically foolhardy - had Hockey and Tony Abbott not inveigled them into it with five years of populist nonsense about ''debt and deficit'', with their economically illiterate contention that budget deficits are always and everywhere a bad thing and always the product of wasteful spending decisions, never the weak state of the economy?
What the political experts haven't noticed is that Hockey has conned Labor into being so foolish while quietly manoeuvring himself into a position where he and the Liberals won't be matching Labor's folly.
When, a week ago, Hockey trumped up a story about how he'd take no notice of the econocrats' pre-election economic and fiscal outlook statement (the ''pee-fo'') - to be released no more than 10 days into the election campaign, and now sure to be virtually identical to Bowen's statement - because Treasury couldn't be trusted, the political types thought it meant he was refusing to let Treasury and Finance cost the Coalition's election promises.
But oppositions never let Treasury cost their promises because it's too politically risky. That's why taxpayers have been run to the expense of setting up the Parliamentary Budget Office. Hockey did say he'd be using the office to cost at least some of his promises.
For months Hockey's been saying he couldn't possibly release his costings until he'd seen the pre-election economic and fiscal outlook statement. This convenient excuse for delaying the release of detailed policies until the last possible moment before the election wasn't justified by his need to use the statement to cost particular promises.
No, it was justified by the need to see Treasury's most recent stab at the expected budget balances over the next year or two so the opposition would know how much it could afford to spend. It would also allow the Liberals to commit to achieving Treasury's forecasts or bettering them by $x billion.
Penny dropped yet? By claiming the fiscal outlook statement couldn't be trusted, Hockey was freeing the opposition from having to make anything but the vaguest commitment about when it would get the budget back to surplus, even though its opponents had nailed themselves to a hard and fast target.
In this Hockey isn't just being politically fast-footed, he's also being economically wise. When the outlook for the economy is so uncertain - with, as the Reserve Bank governor spelt out just last week, a lot of things needing to fall into place before we return even to trend growth - Hockey is keeping all options open, while Bowen is busily closing them.
If, God forfend, the economy were to slow to the point of contraction sometime in the next four years, Bowen would have to break a promise to do anything about it. If growth were still below trend in two years, he's pledged to make things worse.
The opposition's wider - though unscrupulous - political achievement is convincing the media the federal budget is the economy, that the ultimate test of good economic management is not to keep the standard of living rising or stop unemployment worsening, but to get the budget back to surplus come hell or high water.
Its success in this deception - which includes convincing the media Labor's utterly remarkable finesse in minimising the effects of the global financial crisis was just an exercise in monumentally wasteful government spending - is thanks to Labor's lack of courage, talent and commitment to enlightened macro-economics.
Bowen's best excuse is that, after five years of dereliction and intellectual dishonesty, it was far too late to try to turn things around.
But the greatest absurdity of the economic statement is the way grown men and women could pretend it was possible to say anything meaningful about the state of the economy or the budget balance in three or four years.
