Hockey turns to Sunny Joe for new sales job

JOE Hockey has pumped some air into his tyres for his new sales job.

Left to right, Joe Hockey, Finance Minister Mathias Cormann, parliamentary secretary Kelly O’Dwyer, Small Business Minister Bruce Billson and Assistant Treasurer Josh Frydenberg yesterday with the 2015 Intergenerational Report. Picture: Kym Smith

JOE Hockey has pumped some air into his tyres.

Seemingly taking to heart the external and internal criticism that last year’s budget sales job fell flat, the Treasurer is brimming with optimism and is positively bouncy.

“It’s a great future. Our nation has a fantastic future but we’ve got to own it,’’ Sunny Joe gushed against a backdrop of charts from the 2015 Intergenerational Report.

Hockey attempted to conjure up such a sense of excitement ­yesterday it was almost a shame his promotional pitch was sans a set of free steak knives.

INTERACTIVE: The InterGenerational Report

Tony Abbott was similarly upbeat in question time, freed from past barnacles, as he appealed to Labor to join in a debate on the road map for Australia’s future. Politicking, he said, too often disfigured debate. It belies the fact the government’s 145-page “social compact between the generations’’ is also a political blueprint.

The IGR underlines in stark terms the national imperative to achieve long-term budget savings and structural reforms to equip Australia with the armoury it needs to combat the demographic time-bomb of an ageing population. Hockey and Abbott need to convince the community to engage in a ­conversation about the challenges over the horizon.

Unlike Budget 2014, they’ve worked out they need Australians on side for long-run economic change. Tough conversations need to be had on the aged pension, superannuation and workforce participation.

The pugilist Prime Minister has been keen of late to show his bipartisan stripes. Abbott extended the olive branch to the last of his backbench rebels, ensuring his vocal critics who called for a leadership spill were given a chance to ask a question in parliament. It was the turn of Dennis Jensen, Luke Simpkins and Warren Entsch.

But Bill Shorten is having none of what he calls the “Prime Minister’s new-found passion for sensible conversations about facts’’.

Labor is not budging. Opposition treasury spokesman Chris Bowen branded the IGR highly politicised and a missed opportunity. It was, he said, full of “more hot air than the Hindenburg’’.

The Opposition Leader pursued Abbott over the IGR’s response to climate change and recycled an oldie but a goodie, asking if his “only plan for the future is to make Australians work longer and to cut their pensions?’’

As the Coalition attempts to redraw the budgetary battlelines to include a debate about quality of life in four decades, Labor senses there is more mileage to be had in re-running its lines from four months ago.