By way of comparison, Tony Abbott is blowing $1.8 billion on reviving the novated lease/FBT tax lurk enjoyed by a minority of new car buyers, let alone an even smaller minority of voters. Consider the massive percentage increase in the Coalition’s budget improvement goal that could be obtained by implementing just this one tax policy based on principle and equity instead of subsidising a few salary packaging firms. Hey Joe, do the math.

Even if you take year three and four budget projections seriously (and you really can’t, as everyone should now know), that works out to be an average improvement of $1.5 billion a year on a $400 billion budget – all of 0.375 per cent. It’s not even a rounding error. A half-decent Queensland storm can blow that away in half an hour.

(My suspicion is that this particular branch of the tax minimisation industry is very fortunate Labor didn’t accept Treasury’s advice to fix the rapidly-expanding anomaly when it was first offered. If the reform had been a little further away from the election, Joe would have done the head shake again and moaned about needing to responsibly accept some things that he didn’t like, as he has with the rest of Labor’s savings. So it goes. )

The partial, belated and not-at-all-guaranteed guesses about Hockeynomics’ savings and costings only confirm the suspicion that the Coalition has never been serious in its ranting about deficits and debts, that we don’t actually have a budget crisis. Alternatively, the Coalition is not serious about tightening fiscal policy when it would be responsible to do so – in those somewhat vague years three and four.

It’s not unreasonable to claim that the Coalition isn’t making any savings worth mentioning despite the many billions claimed - their “savings” mostly are immediately spent again and thus don’t save anything. In fiscal terms, rather than promising to be the ideological demons conjured by Kevin Rudd, the Liberal Party is offering itself as Tweedle Dum to Labor’s Tweedle Dee.

That’s mainly good news in the short term. It could indicate that the Coalition understands that trying to slash the deficit this year would be bad and dangerous policy, that the budget updated by Chris Bowen a month ago is basically sound, that the economy needs that budget’s $30 billion or so of deficit stimulus and is likely to still require a light touch in 2014-15. The wild world willing, we could be on track to handle renewed discipline in those projection years, or so we hope.

And that’s the bad news - there’s no sign that Abbott/Hockey won’t be as populist and fiscally hopeless as the final Howard/Costello administration. Oh, it was a grand old party over those final three years, the punch spiked twice over, but everyone’s forgotten that it was forcing the Reserve Bank to hit the brakes so hard we were heading for a recession, saved only by the GFC giving us a soft landing.