There’s a nice example of a double standard at work on economic policy at the moment.

There are a lot of double standards in politics. The Coalition never gets the benefit of the doubt on social policy, for example, when it is frequently no less progressive than Labor. And, as Crikey noted last week, Labor’s blatant dog-whistling on population issues currently is being ignored in a way that is inconceivable if John Howard had said exactly the same things Julia Gillard is saying.

But on economic policy it cuts the other way. The Coalition always gets the benefit of the doubt from the media, while Labor is subjected to the harshest scrutiny.

The Coalition is currently blatantly at odds with the Reserve Bank on economic policy. As Crikey noted back in March, the RBA has become less and less subtle in its commentary on the Coalition’s economic pronouncements. Yesterday, Glenn Stevens went still further in stating the government’s stimulus had played a “sizable” role in the economic recovery and Australia had “virtually no net public debt”.

You can bet that if Ken Henry had made the same statements he’d be dismissed as a partisan player by the Coalition. They don’t dare do the same to Stevens.

We also had US economist Joseph Stiglitz yesterday, telling Fairfax’s excellent Jess Irvine about the Rudd-Swan stimulus package: “When I look around the world, it was, I think, probably the best-designed stimulus program in the world and you should be happy that in fact it worked in exactly the way it was designed to work.”

We heard a lot about US economists during the GFC and its aftermath, and in particular from conservatives insisting the government’s stimulus package wouldn’t work because, according to right-wing US economists, it didn’t include permanent tax cuts. The punters wouldn’t spend any stimulus payments because it wasn’t a permanent increase in income.

It’s rare that an economic theory is so convincingly refuted by experience, but that’s what happened in Australia at least.

But the Coalition continues on its merry way with an economic policy based around the basic idea that the stimulus was a waste of money and that all debt, ever, is bad, regardless of circumstances.

Labor turned its back on its economic reform tradition after losing office in 1996. It has never quite regained its reform mojo. But the Coalition’s cave-in to a selective blend of discredited right-wing economic orthodoxy and political opportunism puts that failure by Labor deep in the shade.

The dissonance between Stevens and the Coalition was picked up by several Fairfax journalists, but otherwise it got lost in the campaign spin cycle. You can bet if it was Labor so obviously at odds with the RBA during an election  campaign and the Coalition earning plaudits from visiting US economists, the media would be hammering Labor’s economic credibility. Right-wing commentators would have been hysterical in their denunciation.

The Coalition’s entire economic policy for the election rests on hoping the RBA puts interest rates up in a fortnight. Its entire economic credibility rests on the fact that Andrew Robb has a basic grasp of economics and can count — two skills that appear to be beyond Tony Abbott and Joe ‘Paris Hilton’ Hockey. You could multiply their economic skills together and still end up with a fraction of Robb’s nous.

In fact the opposition would do a damn sight better if they locked Abbott and Hockey up on economic issues and just let Robb do all the work. The other two are an embarrassment and a distraction.

Even then, though, Robb would be stuck trying to argue the economic equivalent of declaring that black is white.