I wonder if the Coalition realise just how incongruous their rhetoric is with Tony selling the ‘death cult’ and ‘home-grown terrorist’ angle and trying to convince us he has to spend billions to keep us safe, while Joe Hockey is telling us it will be ‘intergenerational theft’ to spend money on health, education, and welfare.

Tony has a hard sell because we don’t actually feel as afraid as he would like us to and people are starting to wonder about someone who uses twenty billion dollars to buy a vote to keep him leader when he may already have used that same $20 billion to buy a signature on a free trade agreement.

Now he is asking us to chip in over $400 million so he can spy on innocent people because the proposed metadata retention laws have so many gaps in them that they will be easily circumvented by anyone who wants to, be they genuine terrorists, pedophiles, or journalists.

Rather than helping the “war on terror”, I think we got more truth from AFP commissioner Andrew Colvin who said the scheme could “absolutely” be used to tackle online copyright infringement.

“Illegal downloads, piracy, cyber crimes, cyber security, all these matters – our ability to investigate them is absolutely pinned to our ability to retrieve and use metadata,” he told reporters.

Funnily enough, Malcolm Turnbull and Steve Ciobo were quite vociferous in their opposition to metadata retention when they were in opposition.  This time around, Malcolm was excluded from National Security Committee discussions of the proposal but then, even though he hadn’t been at the meetings, he was sent out to explain it after both Tony Abbott and George Brandis struggled to clarify what data would be held.

Expecting them to have a consistent view on anything other than ‘stop the boats’ and ‘axe the tax’ has become unrealistic.

Against this backdrop, Joe is softening us up for the soon to be released Intergenerational Report which will contain lots of big scary numbers with no context.

Whether the delay in its release, which is a breach of the Charter of Budget Honesty, has been forced on Joe so he can do a quick rewrite, or he is choosing the timing to be closer to his next budget, we can be certain to hear a lot of “stealing from our children and our grandchildren”.

This is also going to be a very hard sell.

He has to convince students that, to save the government from having a future debt, they should take on a very large personal debt – so large that many of them will choose not to take on tertiary education.

He has to convince pensioners that they should take a cut to their indexation because it is too hard to tax high-earning superannuees.

He has to convince us that a “value signal” on going to the doctor won’t lead to increased chronic illness and hospital admissions.

He has to convince us that we must hunt down all the people who are rorting welfare payments but that chasing corporate taxation would be “detrimental for business”.

He has to convince us that, with unemployment rising particularly amongst our youth, that we should all work till we are 70.

And he has to convince us of this while Tony is boosting defence and security spending and buying submarines and fighter jets and helicopters and patrol boats hand over fist; while Peter Dutton is spending billions keeping children locked up in detention ; while Tony is spending tens of billions building his (finger number four) roads of the 21^st century.

I would suggest that even Joe’s quivering references to his children won’t save him this time.

I have a suggestion on what we can do to fix the “debt and deficit disaster” without having to burden anyone at all or cut anything at all.

Borrow pot loads and invest it in the Future Fund.  You remember the Future Fund, Australia’s Sovereign Wealth Fund, established for the benefit of future generations of Australians?  You may not because it isn’t counted in the budget bottom line.

Well, as at the 31^st of December 2014, it was $109.21 billion in the black.  We also have $3.77 billion in the Education Investment Fund, $3.71 billion in the Building Australia Fund, $1.95 billion in the Health and Hospitals Fund and $830 million in the DisabilityCare Australia Fund.

Its investment returns for the 2013-14 financial year yielded $12 billion ($48.7bn since its inception in May 2006 on accumulated contributions of $60.5 billion invested).  The 2014-15 budget shows $13.2 billion interest will be paid to service CGS liabilities for the year to June 2014, so we came out roughly square (give or take a billion) so you can stop worrying about our billion a month in interest payments.

Despite the global financial crisis in 2008, the fund has enjoyed an average nominal annual growth rate of 7.2 per cent.

The Australia Government Bond 10Y rate is currently about 2.57 per cent.  That means we could borrow money (issue bonds) and reinvest it making a net gain of almost 5%.

Interestingly, though you will hear Conservatives tell us this nest egg is solely due to John Howard’s surpluses (and the sale of Telstra), in the 2008 and 2009 federal budgets, the Labor Rudd Government transferred A$41 billion into the Future Fund, and established three new funds, known as the Nation-building Funds: a A$20 billion Building Australia Fund to invest in roads, rail, ports and broadband; an $11 billion Education Investment Fund, which absorbed a similar $6 billion fund set up by the previous government; and a A$10 billion Health and Hospital Fund.

These transfers created or contributed to the budget deficits of A$27 and A$57 billion respectively in the 2008 and 2009 years.  Rather than burdening our children with our debt they were setting money aside for their future needs.

Costello took money out of the economy by running surpluses and sold our assets to make his contribution.  Swan borrowed money when times were toughest to invest even more to stimulate the economy through investments and to grow a fund for future generations.  The Coalition takes from us while the Labor Party gives to us, and they call the progressives economic vandals.  The Coalition simply have no understanding of how it works.

In 2007, Labor suggested it wanted to withdraw $2.7 billion to start the NBN, paying the Future Fund a commercial rate of return on the invested funds, with all profits being returned into the Future Fund allowing further investment.

The Howard government screamed blue murder proclaiming that Labor intended to “raid” the Future Fund for their own means.  Surely this is exactly the type of thing we have a future fund for – something that would benefit all Australians through immediate employment in the design and construction, future generations who will benefit from access to high-speed broadband, and the investors who will receive a return on their investment.

Joe Hockey will tell you that the purpose of the fund is to meet the government’s future liabilities for the payment of superannuation to retired public servants.  I very much doubt that bill would be anywhere near the fund’s annual return – $12 billion and growing – and this is entirely unnecessary anyway as any future liabilities can be paid for as they arise by issuing bonds if necessary.  It is also not how the fund describes itself and nor should it.  This money should not be quarantined but used to build our children’s future.

So the next time Hockey tears up about what we are doing to our children, remind him of the Future Fund that is sitting there earning money to “benefit future generations of Australians.”

What would be far more sensible than borrowing to park money in the Future Fund would be to follow Michael Pascoe’s advice in the SMH:

“Commonwealth 10-year bonds are trading with a yield of 2.5 per cent. Right now, the government could borrow as much as it can dream of for very little, invest it in infrastructure development with a double-digit rate of return, improve the nation’s productivity, overcome some of the shorter-term challenges of our structural adjustment, reduce unemployment, end its over-reliance on monetary policy and restore some of the inter-generational balance that has been lost by public sector investment falling to its lowest level in generations.

But that would take leadership and trust and confidence in the leadership – not a boy who’s been crying wolf.”

Whilst Tony and Joe will be pushing counter narratives on our spending power – unlimited funds for national security, but health education and welfare are unaffordable – they are consistent on one message – they want us to be afraid.