The new Prime Minister has confirmed the Liberals fiscal and budget repair strategy is completely meaningless and while fiscal rules remain theyre there to be broken.

On ABC Insiders this morning, the new Prime Minister said:

there are exceptions to the rules, the government reserves the right to exercise that discretion, but they are the rules.

The Liberal Party effectively tore up the fiscal rules when Scott Morrison was Treasurer, failing to offset proposed income tax cuts, because in Mr Morrisons view, he didntconsider tax relief a cost to the Budget.

A week ago the new Treasurer, Josh Frydenberg said there were no fiscal rules.

Were not making cuts in our economy.what we are doing is growing our economy. Transcript, ABC Radio National, 20 September 2018

The Finance Minister Mathias Cormann sought to clean that up and pretend there were rules.

No. I mean I dont know where all this speculation comes from.The rule remains precisely the same. Transcript, Sky News AM Agenda, 26 September 2018

Whatever the government says, we know it has given up on these budget rules, they are rules on paper only.

For years the government has committed to offsetting all new spending and banking any unanticipated uplift in tax receipts yet in the most recent Budget it dropped that, choosing unfunded income tax cuts over budget responsibility.

Yet the more desperate this government becomes, the more it thinks it's can walk both sides of the fence, on one hand committing to its own budget rules, and on the other relying on a "stronger economy" to support new spending.

In contrast, Labor has made the tough calls such as reforming unsustainable tax concessions such as negative gearing and capital gains to help put the Budget back on a more structurally sound footing.