Mark Kenny Senior political correspondent
February 15, 2013
Up for attack ... Treasurer Wayne Swan. Photo: Alex Ellinghausen
Julia Gillard's political troubles went from bad to worse on Thursday as her chief economic salesman first fluffed his lines on possible income tax rises and then quoted the wrong jobless number in Parliament.
For a government with a solid story to tell on the economy, Wayne Swan's refusal to rule out income tax rises in the budget (since ruled out), and his ''mistake'' in quoting the unemployment rate as 5.1 per cent instead of 5.4, sent government morale further south.
The opposition is now gunning for the man it regards as Labor's weakest link.
Jobs after all are supposed to be the government's most central concern. As Labor points out, it is the Coalition which is planning income tax rises.
It concluded another horrible week for Labor.
In Parliament, Labor's despair is palpable.
After one barely convincing defence from Swan at the dispatch box, not a single ''hear-hear'' was uttered as government MPs stared at their iPads.
It is now less than six months from the formal beginning of the election campaign. The precise timing had suggested a hidden strategy for 2013 - a steady rise punctuated with smart initiatives and the deft use of the various advantages of office.
Yet that timetable is feeling much more like a closing window, or as one dejected supporter called it, ''a guillotine''.
The embattled Swan would have been relieved to feel wheels up as he jetted off to Moscow for a G20 finance ministers' meeting late on Thursday. At least in international circles, Australia's stellar economic record still cuts some ice.
That it doesn't do so at home is a blight on the government and an indictment of the Treasurer's sales skills.
The Minerals Resource Rent Tax is a case in point.
The Treasurer blamed market volatility in iron-ore prices, a high dollar and other conditions to explain its pathetic $126 million return over six months. Everyone else knows it was hobbled for political convenience.
The opposition is now gunning for the man it regards as Labor's weakest link.
The logic is that by damaging Swan, whom voters do not rate anyway, they can also scuttle Labor's diminishing hopes of leveraging the economy electorally.
Unlike Gillard, whose best performances have come when she is up against it, Swan wears his vulnerability.
With him, pressure shows - it brings mis-steps.
His obvious MRRT pain flows directly from his other self-inflicted wound - the promise come hell or high water to deliver a surplus.
It was he who made the surplus into the albatross it has now become.
And it was he who insisted on it when it was obvious to all and sundry that it was either unachievable - or worse, ill-advised.
Swan may have been tagged internationally as the world's greatest treasurer, but right now Labor's hopes turn on whether he can lift his game at home and dramatically
