WAYNE Swan is busy deflating expectations about the tax forum; shadow treasurer Joe Hockey has the bellows out to fan them, so they'll later be disappointed.
This meeting was imposed on the government, in particular by Rob Oakeshott. It could not be more different from the 1985 tax summit, which the Hawke government used to negotiate a big tax reform package (though it could not get all it wanted).
The forum will be a talkfest, followed by Swan outlining the government's priorities and, it is expected, at some point unveiling specific action to help businesses hit by the two-speed economy. Swan is in an awkward position. He doesn't like it said that certain subjects are ''taboo'' at the meeting. He insists no one will turn off the microphone if participants talk about the GST, the mining tax or the carbon tax. But he is equally adamant he won't be taking on board arguments for changing those taxes. The government has settled its position on them and that's that.
Such intransigence might be reasonable when the taxes concerned are policies that this government has brought in - the carbon and mining taxes.
But the GST? Let's face it, putting a fence around the GST (and the opposition does this, as well as the government) limits consideration of meaningful tax reform. How long is this central tax - which earlier was off limits to the Henry review - going to be a protected species? A decade more? Two decades?
Swan is, in general, unsympathetic to calls from the states for more federal money from any source to help them get rid of inefficient state taxes. Step up yourselves, he says - again narrowing real discussion, as distinct from posturing (which will be increased by the partisan divide between several state governments and the federal government and the politically weak position of the latter).
Hockey is being purely mischievous when he says that people expect the summit will deliver ''immediate relief for Australian households''.
Anyone who did so would be either naive or deaf to what has been said.
Still, the government should be mindful that if the forum is seen as simply a hot air balloon, voters will become even more cynical about federal Labor.
Michelle Grattan is the political editor of The Age
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