If there was ever a peak danger period for Labor in this long, long election campaign, it was this week.
It has been the week when Labor confirmed what had been clear for a few weeks: that the spending and taxing plans it has announced to date were going to lead to a deterioration in the budget bottom line in the next four years before revenue measures – like changes to negative gearing rules and capital gains tax – start to build up and fill government coffers.
On May 22, when the The Australian Financial Review first pointed out the short-term problem in Labor's costings, it estimated the likely shortfall at around $8 billion over the next four years, based on a rough count of the major spending and savings measures that had been announced at that point.
Labor has promised to spend a lot more money since then.
That makes what Bill Shorten and Chris Bowen announce on Friday and over the weekend the real make or break point for Labor in this campaign, and in the long process of redeeming its credentials as an economic manager.
Controversial and potentially unpopular
Not since John Hewson in the early 1990s have we seen an opposition leader and his team take more risks by spelling out controversial and potentially unpopular policy decisions on taxation and government spending ahead of an election campaign.
As Hewson himself often wryly observes, his only problem was that while he might have been good at policy, it turned out he wasn't very good at politics. Up against Paul Keating, Hewson and his Fightback! package were smashed.
It would be utter folly to think that Shorten and Bowen are as politically naïve and would not understand just how high risk their strategy has been, and remains.
However, their campaign to date – going back months now – has shown a military precision in the way they have rolled out ideas and policy proposals like negative gearing.
But we have now reached the point where Labor is going to have to suck it up and surrender on a range of Coalition budget decisions it has bitterly fought ever since the 2014 budget, or at the least offer modified versions of these.
Speaking plainly
You can tell when politicians know things are getting perilous by their language.
While Labor has been making a virtue of speaking plainly about many of its decision until now, when it finally conceded on Wednesday that it was looking at a worse budget situation than the Coalition's, Chris Bowen's language became somewhat more tortured.
"It is true to say we will have less of a fiscal contraction than the government over the first four years as we return to balance in the same year", he said.
Shorten and Bowen know that simply promising that they will get back to surplus at the same time as the Coalition means absolutely nothing to an electorate that lived through the years of 'surplus promise politics' post-GFC.
In fact, it only puts Labor's historic credibility problem up in neon lights. This is why it will be looking to get an economic credibility boost out of its announcement on Friday, particularly as it will come at significant cost of loss of faith in its support base.
The oddest thing about this week's discussion about budget policy, though, is how lame the Coalition's attack on Labor has appeared.
Maybe it is because it has had its rhetoric about the opposition turned up to 11 for so long that it doesn't have anywhere to go. Maybe it takes the more pragmatic and basic view that as long as voters are hearing about the economy and the deficit it will be good for the Coalition and not for Labor.
But surely they could do a little better than just wheeling out the same tired old lines about a "plan for jobs and growth", "same old Labor", "spend spend spend" etc.
Budgetary problems
Labor now pivots on budget policy as we go into a long weekend when, its strategists no doubt hope, not too many people will notice it has rolled over on a substantial part of the so-called $18 billion of 'zombie' savings that have been stuck in the Senate since 2014.
If it cannot persuasively argue it has a budget story that sticks together over the next four years, all the talk about how things get better over 10 years will be for nought. Scott Morrison is right to say that credit ratings agencies (a group that miraculously survived the GFC with their influence in tact) only look over four years, not 10.
Of course, the Coalition has its own budgetary problems. Labor quite rightly points out that the government's apparent budget position relies on the passage through the Senate of those same 'zombie' savings. So if Labor decides to accept them, it would also make the post-election budgetary position of a re-elected Turnbull government better too.
But there is a broader problem for both sides of politics here. The underpinnings of the entire debate about spending and taxing is the Coalition's $50 billion company tax promise.
Its commitment at the budget to this "fully funded" measure has set the frame within which Labor has claimed it can spend money because it is not spending it on this company tax cut.
That is, while it says it has a range of measures like negative gearing which will fund its spending promises in areas like health and education, the company tax cut gives it the 'moral' room to spend more and to suggest it is simply a choice of the country spending money on tax cuts for big companies or health and education.
Another black hole
The problem is that the brawl over the economic impact of the company tax cut has partly obscured the other aspect of the argument about the modelling of the tax cut.
That is, the modelling on which the government is relying on its company tax cuts makes a series of presumptions that must leave the average person looking for another black hole.
For example, there is the truly wonderful presumption that the company tax cut will be significantly funded by multinational companies voluntarily bringing their earnings back onshore in gratitude for a lower tax rate
So if the Coalition is returned, and manages to somehow get its company tax cut through the Senate (not at all certain), there must be a question about the real cost of the company tax cut.
However, if the company tax cut doesn't get through the Senate – and that is certainly the more realistic prospect, the concern will not be so much about the budget cupboard being bare as the policy cupboard.
Laura Tingle is The Australian Financial Review's political editor.
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