Whatever else Tony Abbott may or may not do over the next three years, I doubt that he will go back on any of the promises he made. Politics is politics and running an economy is something else. So where Maurice Newman has written in today’s AFR how the Prime Minister must attend to various economic issues, I fear they will fall on deaf ears. They will fall on deaf ears in part because of what the PM said before the election, and they will fall on deaf ears because aside from paid maternity leave, every one of the policies he took up from the ALP would arrive back in spades if the Labor Party should happen to be returned.

Nevertheless, Newman does have a point:

The federal government’s top business adviser has criticised the cost of the National Disability Insurance Scheme and the school funding reforms, slammed wages as too high and industrial relations as being too rigid, and urged the government to push the envelope in order to ‘repair’ the economy.

In a fiery speech on Monday night, Maurice Newman, the head of the Prime Minister’s Business Advisory Council, lamented as ‘hasty’ Tony Abbott’s pre-election promises to quarantine such areas as health and defence from budget cuts and suggested the Prime Minister ‘disturb the comfort zones of many’ to pay down debt and cut the deficit as soon as possible.

Vowing to furnish Mr Abbott with ‘dependable and fearless advice’, Mr Newman said the economy was ‘running on empty’ and, without reforms and fiscal discipline, it was ‘facing the prospect of growth with a zero in front of it’.

‘That will feel like hitting a brick wall,’ he said.

That GDP growth will decline for around a year is just how it is if there is to be a redeployment of resources to where they might actually be used productively. And I wish there was more explicit recognition that the only way for a recovery ever to occur will be if it is driven by the private sector.

But almost everyone only likes market outcomes when it suits them. I can only hope that the politics doesn’t overwhelm economic reform.