By political reporter Louise Yaxley
Photo: Joe Hockey is having a hard time getting his budget measures through the Senate (AAP: Alan Porritt)
Treasurer Joe Hockey is struggling to get budget measures through the unwieldy Senate, and is now looking at ways to bypass it.
Federal Parliament rose for the winter break without passing many of the measures Mr Hockey had announced in his first budget.
One is a plan to pay state governments a bonus if they privatise assets and use the money for building projects.
Mr Hockey hopes to get around the Senate to implement the plan for the asset recycling fund, which would be used for new infrastructure like the East West Link in Melbourne.
He says Labor has gone back on its word to allow the measure to pass the Senate so he will use another tactic.
"They deliberately misled the Australian people and deliberately misled us, and haven't kept their word that they'd facilitate its passage," he said.
"So we will seek to appropriate the money so that we can get on with building the infrastructure that Australia needs."
But Labor's treasury spokesman Chris Bowen rejects that.
"We made it clear that we'd move amendments to this legislation. If the amendments failed in the Senate we would pass the legislation," he said.
"Well our amendments didn't fail in the Senate. They succeeded in the Senate. The Government's chosen not to accept them.
"So for Joe Hockey to say that somehow this is Labor's fault is just blatantly misleading, and I would suggest deliberately, the Australian people."
Appropriating the money would be a way for Mr Hockey to get around the fact that the Senate amended his bill in a way he does not like.
"Of course there's always these option available to treasurers but this treasurer has shown himself pathologically incapable of dealing with a Parliament which he doesn't have the majority," Mr Bowen said.
"See what he can do is he can beat his chest and huff and puff and lecture people but he's very hard at negotiating and talking to people about detailed policy proposals."
Mr Hockey is using reports from the ratings agencies to try to bolster his argument.
"Standard and Poor's, just as Moody's did about a month ago, have warned that unless corrective action is taken on the budget, then there is a debt and deficit trajectory that could represent a very significant threat to our AAA rating," he said.
Mr Hockey points out Labor is now blocking some of the measures in the Senate that it announced as savings when it was in government.
However, Mr Bowen defends that.
"What he doesn't say is that we have some measures which were funding particular spending initiatives which he has scrapped," he said.
"So of course if we had a measure funding a particular spending initiative and he scraps it, well that entitles us to question whether that change should be made in the first place. That's a very legitimate point for us to make.
"We would also make this point, there are other options available to the Government, the new Government, which the previous government had in place which he's scrapped. Like making multinational companies pay a fairer share of tax, by cracking down on tax evasion, like getting high income earners to pay a fairer share of tax on superannuation.
"There were measures available to him that the previous government had in place, which he's reversed."
