Now he tells us. Within days of his appointment as Treasurer last year Scott Morrison rashly assured us he faced "a spending problem, not a revenue problem".
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Would he need to pull in more revenue? "I'm not in that camp," he told the ABC's Leigh Sales.
But he is now. In a speech that bookends the remarks he made a year ago this week on taking the job, he concedes he has "an earnings problem".
"Deficits have proven difficult to shift in recent years, despite applying significant expenditure controls," he told the Bloomberg Economic Summit in Sydney. "The situation has been made even worse by the budget sabotage engaged in by the opposition during the last Parliament and the unwillingness of the previous Senate to enable the government to implement our agenda for budget repair."
"Despite these challenges, since the 2013 pre-election financial statement we have kept expenditure under control. In 2013, the statement estimated government payments in 2015-16 would be $425 billion. In the 2016 statement, which mirrored this year's budget, the estimated expenditure was the same at $425 billion.
"However, the projected revenues set out in the 2013 statement were not realised. The revenue estimate for 2015-16 fell by $35.5 billion and for 2016-17 fell by $39.5 billion by the 2016 PEFO statement.
"In other words, we have an earnings problem."
He is still maintaining that he won't solve it by taxing more, although his definition of taxing more is a little loose. Apparently it's not taxing more when you "protect the revenue base from structural weaknesses".
The measures include cracking down on multinational tax avoidance, extending the goods and services tax to digital and low-value imports, and recalibrating "the way generous tax concessions are provided in the superannuation system".
Will they be enough? Not at all. That's why he is preparing to hack away further at spending to solve what he now concedes is an income problem.
As he puts it, "you don't encourage growth by taxing it more". Of course, withdrawing spending doesn't help much either, but to him it's a lesser evil.
Of the $40 billion in budget measures yet to be passed, more than 60 per cent constrain spending. Only a third, $15 billion, boost revenue.
By setting out scary predictions for gross debt (a measure scarcely mentioned in the budget because the Treasury prefers the smaller and more meaningful measure of net debt) he is softening us up for more. He is also doing it by talking about the tragedy of saddling our grandchildren with debt, even though most of it will be used to provide facilities such as roads, schools, hospitals and the national broadband network which those grandchildren will use. And he is doing it by talking about the taxed and the taxed-nots. It would be scary if you were one of the taxed-nots, who are usually on very low incomes.
Peter Martin is economics editor of The Age.
