Politics punishes truth-tellers who arrive before the pain is obvious.

In 2014, Tony Abbott and his Treasurer Joe Hockey delivered a federal budget that detonated on contact. It was branded cruel, heartless, and ideological. Protesters marched. Commentators howled. The Senate vowed resistance. Within a year, Abbott was gone.

The verdict was swift and brutal: the budget was not merely bad politics, but a moral failure – proof that the Coalition had lost touch with ordinary Australians.

Twelve years on, as Australians face persistent inflation, rising interest rates, and a political class that now treats high public debt and elevated spending as the natural order of things, it is time to ask a heretical question:

What if Abbott was right?

What if the most despised act of his prime ministership was also the most serious – and the most loving – thing any Australian leader has attempted in a generation?

The 2014 budget rested on an idea now considered almost indecent: that a country cannot indefinitely spend money it does not have, and that debt is not neutral simply because it is popular.

At the time, Australia was drunk on its own luck. We had dodged recession during the global financial crisis. Borrowing was cheap. Governments had learned that deficits could be explained away, and voters had learned that someone else would always pay later. Abbott shattered that illusion.

He spoke of trajectory rather than crisis. Of compounding rather than collapse. Of structural deficits, ageing-driven spending and a political culture that had lost the courage to say no. It was not a warning of imminent disaster – it was a warning about inevitability. That warning was ridiculed.

Today, deficits are routine. Government debt is far higher than it was in the mid-2010s. Household leverage is among the highest in the developed world. And in February 2026, the Reserve Bank of Australia raised interest rates again, reminding Australians that economic reality does not care about political comfort.

The emergency Abbott named was real. The only thing wrong with his timing was that it made people uncomfortable.

The true crime of the 2014 budget was not its numbers, but its assumptions about citizenship. It assumed Australians could handle limits.

It asked patients to make a modest contribution to routine care. It asked students to accept that education is not free. It tightened welfare settings to reassert the link between work and dignity. It imposed a temporary levy on high earners. It said, explicitly, that the state could not endlessly cushion every discomfort without consequence.

For this, it was declared immoral.

Why? Because by 2014 a new orthodoxy had taken hold: governments existed not to govern, but to reassure. Politics was no longer about trade-offs, but about denying they existed at all.

Abbott’s budget violated that creed. It said entitlement has a cost. It said responsibility matters. It said adulthood cannot be permanently outsourced to the state. And for saying so, it was politically crucified.

The fury directed at the 2014 budget makes sense once viewed through the lens of what I call trickle-down government – the belief that the state can endlessly expand support, protection and entitlement, while responsibility and cost are always deferred downward to someone else: future taxpayers, future governments and, sadly, future generations.

This should not be confused with trickle-down economics; the two are opposites. One argues that growth creates capacity. The other assumes capacity can be created indefinitely by government itself.

Under trickle-down government, limits are treated as moral failure. Saying ‘no’ is cruelty. Asking people to contribute is punishment. Responsibility is recast as oppression.

Abbott’s budget rejected this worldview outright. It reasserted the unfashionable truth that citizenship involves obligation as well as benefit – and that societies which refuse to acknowledge limits eventually have them imposed brutally by reality.

Abbott believed that telling the truth would earn respect. He was wrong. The budget collided with a political culture that had become addicted to reassurance. Measures were blocked, diluted, or abandoned. The lesson absorbed by Canberra was immediate and enduring: never attempt this again.

And they haven’t.

Since then, both sides of politics have competed not on reform, but on avoidance. Spending has grown. Debt has been normalised. Structural problems have been kicked forward. Responsibility has been offloaded onto people too young to vote and governments not yet elected.

What was once condemned as cruelty now looks suspiciously like discipline. What was sold as compassion increasingly resembles cowardice.

The great lie of modern politics is that compassion and limits are opposites. They are not. Real care does not indulge endlessly. It prepares. It strengthens. It tells uncomfortable truths before they harden into unavoidable crises.

Seen honestly, the 2014 budget was not an act of austerity for its own sake. It was an act of civic faith. It assumed politics could still speak about responsibility without apology – rather than trading seriousness for cheap approval and performative politics. It assumed adulthood had not yet been cancelled.

That faith was not rewarded – but it was not misplaced.

The irony of Abbott’s downfall is that the pressures he warned about now dominate economic reality. Persistent deficits. Rising interest costs. A central bank forced to compensate for fiscal drift. Younger Australians inheriting a balance sheet shaped by decades of denial.

The adjustment Abbott sought to make explicit is now being imposed implicitly – through higher borrowing costs, fewer policy choices and a narrowing future.

Abbott’s greatest political sin was arriving too early with the right diagnosis. His most hated budget was not an act of cruelty. It was an act of love – for a country he believed was capable of responsibility, even if it no longer wanted to hear the word.

Politics rejected that message. Economics has not. History may yet be far kinder than his contemporaries ever were.