A tale of two press conferences. A three-headed Coalition monster at the Langham Hotel’s “Alto” function room at Southbank, (eerily recalling the Coonan/Turnbull/Hockey triple header of last October), followed by a Sex Party knees up at a somewhat-sketchy nightclub on the other side of the Yarra.

Not exactly bosom buddies you’d think, given the latter’s rejection of Tony Abbott’s brand of barren Catholicism. But, with the overwhelming theme this morning of getting the government monkey off the back of everyday Australians – the kind that have both mortgages and subscriptions to pay-per-view sleaze shows – it seems the two could have slipped into bed together.

As Tony Abbott promised to slash bureaucracy to “help to ease the cost of living for families”, the Sex Party — an arm of p-rn industry lobbyists Eros Foundation — similarly railed against “greater government intervention into our lives”.

The party’s number one Victorian Senate candidate, Fiona Patten, wasn’t across the detail of the Coalition’s earlier pledge to hack $1.183 million from the budget bottom line, but in an echo of Joe Hockey’s renowned libertarian streak, she questioned whether Canberra bureaucrats should be prying into what people secrete on their mobile phones.

Asked by Crikey whether the party supported the cuts to spending Hockey said would ease the burden on small business, Patten said she would be looking closely at what the cuts meant to all the mum and dad p-rnographers struggling to make ends meet. “I certainly think small business is our background and we would be looking at all legislation and the effect on small business, ” she said.

And Abbott’s dubious “action contract” dovetailed nicely with Patten’s pledge to be the party of “real action”, in the personal realm where it really mattered.

Patten, and Eros director Robbie Swan (also ex-partners) have historically railed against Tony Abbott’s predilection for nanny-statism, but this morning it appeared the Greens were the real target, with Patten saying that Bob Brown’s local lieutenant in the state seat of Richmond, Kathleen Maltzahn, wanted to “criminalise prostitution” and should therefore be avoided. The other baddy was Clive Hamilton, whose enthusiasm for Stephen Conroy’s internet put him firmly in the prude category.

There are other parallels. While Joe Hockey highlighted the last time Labor had presided over a government surplus was in 1989, the year The Bangles topped the charts with Eternal Flame, the S-x Party’s candidate in Warringah, Austen Tayshus, was still riding high in suburban beer barns milking his number 1 hit Australiana. Tayshus, like Victorian ALP pool staffer Conrad French, has promised to appear on the campaign trail sans dignity.

But Patten poured cold water over Sex Party-branded togs on the campaign trail, seemingly leaving Tayshus in the lurch: “We’re not hoping for any mankinis or Speedo shows,” she joked.

The Sex Party is famously concerned with personal politics, and if Crikey‘s deadline had allowed, it would have been interesting to see whether it backed the Coalition’s deification of monetarist economics. Cut government spending, the Coalition appeared to be saying, and small business would reap the benefits through lower interest rates.

At both forums, the detail was lacking. Hockey said he would “to outline some of the detail in these initiatives”, with Robb promising to creat a “line by line” breakdown in savings. But that never came, with the Debt Reduction minister listing instead recent increases in utilities prices, apparently caused by the ALP.

Quite what the Sex Party stands for, aside from individual freedom to do almost anything, also remained opaque.