Donald Trump has lost focus, too. His wall along the Mexican border is yet to be built or paid for by the Mexicans, the US coal industry is yet to surge and, most significantly for Turnbull, the US President has been unwilling to reduce the US budget deficit. Indeed, Trump's budget is set to deliver a deficit of nearly $US1 trillion.

While the Coalition and the Business Council of Australia talk endlessly about Trump's recent tax cuts and how the US economy is creating jobs, neither group seems keen to discuss Trump's record-breaking deficit. Indeed, given that the Coalition was elected on a promise to rapidly restore the budget to surplus, and given the Business Council was so obsessed with the need to reduce the deficit back in 2013 that its former president, Tony Shepherd, ran Tony Abbott's audit commission, the strategic silence coming from the loudest voices in Australian public debate is remarkable.

The Australian business community's current hero is no fiscal conservative. On the contrary, not only is Trump an old-fashioned Keynesian, his budgetary policy is on track to be far more stimulatory than the deficits that Kevin Rudd and Wayne Swan delivered in Australia after the global financial crisis. But in the topsy-turvy world of Australian politics, the groups that led the attack on Rudd's fiscal stimulus are now boosters for the effectiveness of Trump's stimulus.

So what's going on? The simple fact is that the chief executives who make up the Business Council don't care about the deficit's size as long as they're getting what they want from government. And given that, at the moment, the thing they want is $65 billion worth of corporate tax cuts, the business community really, really doesn't care about the federal deficit right now.

The council and the Coalition have long declared that reducing the deficit was key to being "economically responsible", but their policy actions have always contradicted their principled statements. Take John Howard and Peter Costello. While there's no doubt they used the deficit they inherited in 1996 to slash spending on health, education and welfare, there's also no doubt that the tax cuts they introduced at the peak of the mining boom are the main reason that the federal budget is in deficit today. Similarly, while Howard and Costello raged against the "unsustainability" of public spending on preventive health and environmental protection, they introduced incredibly generous, and inequitable, tax concessions for superannuation and private-health insurance, which now cost the budget tens of billions a year.

The pattern has been clear for anyone willing to look. Conservative governments and business groups feign concern about deficits in order to rage against spending on services for people they don't care about, while turning a blind eye to the budgetary effects of policies that put cash in the pockets of groups they do care about. I call it the right-wing ratchet. Historically, it could be summarised as "when times are tough, cut spending on the poor and, when times are good, give tax cuts to the rich".

But the old pattern of delivering the benefits of booms to the powerful and the costs of busts to the vulnerable has broken down. When the right-wing independents voted down the most inequitable of Abbott's 2014 budget cuts, the patterns of Australian politics were drawn anew.

The well-known story that "the left" likes government spending and "the right" doesn't was never based on fact. But the right used to work hard to pretend it believed it. That's why, for example, conservatives spend so much time blaming dole-bludgers for the deficit – it distracts attention from the enormous growth in spending on tax concessions for superannuation, defence and subsidies to the fossil-fuel industry.

But once senators like Clive Palmer, Pauline Hanson and Nick Xenophon wound up holding the balance of power, it was no longer inevitable that the Senate would pass savage cuts to popular services like the age pension and public schools. And while the Senate's composition has changed since 2014, the dynamic hasn't. Which leads us back to the Business Council and Turnbull's latest dilemma.

The business community completely lost the public debate about why the big banks, grocery stores and mining companies should pay less tax in the hope they pay higher wages. So its effort has now shifted to the Senate. In turn, those same "populist" right-wing independents who stopped Abbott's spending cuts are now being asked to support an unfunded $65 billion tax cut for Australia's least popular firms.

The council's prospects of success are made all the harder by the government's decision last year to cut the company tax rate paid by small businesses. Xenophon, Hanson and Cori Bernadi all know that they're more likely to pick up voters from among small-business owners than they are from the Business Council. Yet those same senators are now being asked to vote away the tax advantage the Senate gave to small business just last year.

Which brings me back to Joyce. Most of the right-wing independents see their potential voters coming from the Coalition. In some states, the Nationals and their high-profile former leader's demise has just given his political opponents a huge opportunity. This makes the government and Business Council's task of talking the crossbench into supporting the tax cuts even harder.

Will Xenophon vote to cut Coles and Woolworths' tax rate and increase the deficit? Will Hanson vote to cut the big banks' tax bill and increase the deficit? Or will Derryn Hinch vote to reduce News Corp's tax rate and increase the deficit? Will new South Australian senator Tim Storer from South Australia want one of his first votes to be a legacy of hurting small businesses and delivering deficits?

The business community spent decades pretending to care about the deficit in order to get the spending cuts, and in turn the tax cuts, it wanted. Its problem is that most of the crossbench, like most of the public, took its Chicken Little stories about the deficit seriously.

Little wonder no one's taking the business community seriously now that it's abandoned its feigned interest in the deficit in order to achieve its real interest of a tax cut.

Richard Denniss is The Australia Institute's chief economist. Twitter: @RDNS_TAI