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A Labor government contemplating the inevitability of defeat at the next election might well think that the reciprocal compliment to an incoming Abbott government would be to load it with commitments it will struggle to meet. Perhaps to find it impossible to meet, making Abbott, early on, retreat from commitments, promises made in blood, or to so cut services that he soon became deeply unpopular.

The extra cost of promises already made by Abbott, including the abolition of carbon pricing mineral resource rent taxes is said to be about $70 billion spread over four years. He has foreshadowed at least $52 billion of generally unspecified cuts in government administration and programs over the same period, including cutting his payroll by 12,000 people.

But as with John Howard calming nervous voters before the 1996 election, he is nervous about identifying even broad program areas for extensive cuts, and would prefer to leave the impression that everything good is safe. In defence, in education, in healthcare, in social welfare, and in family services programs as well as indigenous affairs, opposition statements are calculated to suggest immunity from cuts, apart from searches for greater efficiencies.

Meanwhile, the Gillard government wrestles to achieve a modest budget surplus this financial year, and to find funds for new programs that reflect Labor priorities and policies. But almost certainly, it will not be Labor who has to pay the bills.

Agonising about a timetable for implementing the recommendations of the Gonski review of funding for government and non-government schools? The review calls for more than $5 billion more in schools. A decision announced today - perhaps to put its recommendations into effect in the 2014 school year - would hit the Abbott government's deficit, not the Gillard government's surplus.

Money for actual reform in the hospitals and healthcare system, particularly in public health programs, and in areas such as mental health care? Again, decisions announced now will make their biggest impact on the bottom lines confronting a Joe Hockey and Andrew Robb, not a Wayne Swan and a Penny Wong.

The National Disability Insurance Scheme? Gillard already has her way in forcing the states into making a contribution towards the costs of a number of pilot programs which will be used to tune aspects of a scheme with which everyone agrees in principle. In principle, as well, everyone agrees that the scheme should be in full operation by about 2018 - unlikely to be during the term of a Labor government.

What the Commonwealth has yet to do is to resolve funding mechanisms and responsibilities. Best advice is that it should take full responsibility for a scheme which will probably cost about $13 billion a year to run. But if it does this, it must decide whether the states should contribute, or whether they should ''surrender'' the money they will save. It must also decide whether to recover some of the extra costs by a levy, perhaps like the Medicare levy.

Given that it will be Tony Abbott and his team which has to pay the bill, a cynical Gillard might well decide that it should be stateswomanlike to pick up a big burden in an exemplary scheme, without a levy or extra taxes.

Tony Abbott has been expressing ''deep'', if uncommitted concern about the concerns of others, particularly our US allies, about temporary cuts in defence, made in the last budget. The opposition waved through these cuts through in May, but it is easy to imagine that they will soon be talking about how the government has left the nation defenceless. Implicitly, this will suggest a restoration of lost money, or, in any event, a return to aspirations of spending as a proportion of GDP.

It is not hard to compile wish lists of popular long-term commitments which a Gillard government could make, in road and rail infrastructure, in child care, aged care and care in the community, universities, science and research, vocational education, on water, the environment and the arts. It is in the nature of things that governments have ''announceables'' that involve little direct expenditure in the short term, but progressively commit future governments to more and more responsibilities and expenditure. Budget papers frequently announce major decisions, which, on examination, have little impact on the immediate bottom line. They commit a department, for example, to spending $10 million this year for preliminary work, $40 million for a start-up and first few months of operations 20 months hence, and $360 million for a full-year of operations 32 months hence. Sometimes, just the same thing applies to notional ''savings'' over future ''out'' years.

A cynical government might even think that the announcement, and scheduling of new programs and activities which involve co-payments by the states, could be done without advance state agreement. After all, mendicant states must ultimately take what they are given, or nothing, and in any event, the present cycle is of Coalition state governments, whose political problems are for them, not Labor, to sort out.

Strictly, it would be the height of irresponsibility for an incumbent government to load up a future government with obligations and responsibilities it could not meet without going into deep deficit, or by a significant increase in taxes and charges. On the other hand, however, this is a government entitled to govern on its own judgments about the size of the exchequer. It does not, for example, have to budget for giving away existing revenue by abolition of mining resource rent taxes, or for the gaps created by Abbott's insistence that taxpayers will keep carbon tax ''compensation'' even after the tax is abolished. And if the government's mid-term review of its finances became more optimistic about revenue estimates, not all future commitments, such as a commitment to a Gonski scheme would look irresponsible.

Indeed a smart Gillard government might think that forward decisions on such commitments could serve even an instant political purpose, of committing Abbott and the Coalition one way or another to general policies and approaches. Let the public know where they stood.

An opposition cruising towards victory - and this one is - will always be wary of making firm commitments. It wants as free a hand as possible. But a party which has voted for policy and program measures, and for the appropriations to put them into action, will be the more embarrassed if it subsequently cuts spending. If, on the other hand, it opposes the measures, the government can get mileage from the implicit threat to the settled order that a change of government will seem to represent.

This is standard wedge politics; John Howard could be the model for its employment.

It is constitutionally difficult to commit a future government, but easy enough to put it in a tricky position of having to stare down voters who claim to have been ambushed.

Jack Waterford is editor-at-large.