Unlike the muggy spring temperatures outside, the weather within Parliament House for Labor's first federal budget was decidedly wintry with forecasts of leaden skies, chill winds, and serious tempests.
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"Speaker, we now confront the prospect of a third global downturn in a decade and a half," Treasurer Jim Chalmers told the Parliament ominously.
"The global economy teeters again, on the edge - with a war that isn't ending, a global energy crisis that is escalating, inflationary pressures persisting, and economies slowing - some of them already in reverse."
The result is a sharp downgrading of growth forecasts.
An aspiring economic storyteller in the mould of Keating and Costello, Chalmers had a difficult job to do that was neither entirely pleasant, nor entirely consistent.
It involved simultaneously delivering measured productivity-enhancing support to households while preparing the nation for real hardship to come.
It involved for example, simultaneously unveiling a major fund to "expand and modernise Australia's electricity grids at lowest cost," while also girding voters for things to get harder rather than easier.
It was a task bookended by big infrastructure initiatives like the aforementioned $20 billion "Rewiring the Nation" fund, and big warnings aimed at re-worrying the nation.
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The latter was explicitly designed to prepare voters for materially tougher decisions in the May budget of 2023 (just seven months away) in which Chalmers acknowledges, further spending restraint and even tax increases will come into the national conversation.
Does that mean scrapping the already legislated 2024 stage three tax cut as floated before the budget, or perhaps introducing other revenue measures such as a temporary deficit repair levy like Joe Hockey delivered in 2014?
It is far from clear, even if the political dangers are more obvious.
Everything about the budget redux of 2022, was just that little bit off camber, from its unusual timing to its awkward mix of optimism on the one hand, and grim forebodings on the other.
This is a budget that stands on a historically low unemployment rate of 3.5 per cent and a deficit dramatically reduced by strong employment and commodity revenues, and yet which also faces the very real risk of an economy stalling. Or even worse, sliding backwards.
Economic growth for example has been downgraded from a healthy 3.25 per cent in this financial year, to just 1.5 per cent next year. Given global volatilities, such anaemic growth is perilously close to contraction.
Meanwhile, inflation, which is already galloping ahead of dull wages growth, is expected to top out at close to 8 per cent initially before coming back to a manageable 3.5 per cent sometime in 2023-24.
Driving that is energy price rises of around 30 per cent in the next year. Again, with little hope of relief.
Even on the rosier end of predictions, the economic outlook portends pain. Domestic and political.
Chalmers said there were "hard days to come and hard decisions to accompany them".
"Getting through this period stronger than we were before will rely on the best of our character - our resilience, our pragmatism, our cooperation, and our confidence, and above all, our belief in each other".
Since when does a government appeal to voters' "pragmatism" or outside of an emergency, beg for their "cooperation and confidence"? It feels serious.
The original logic for this out-of-cycle budget was that the new government wanted to clear out the brambles of a Coalition blueprint "heaving" with discretionary spending by ministers such as carparks and sports club grants splashed in marginal seats.
That's fair enough and something in the order of $22 billion in such savings have been booked from past Coalition allocations deemed by Chalmers and Finance Minister Katy Gallagher as inappropriate.
There are Labor elements here like the new National Housing Accord, cheaper child care and paid parental leave.
But the story of this budget is runaway inflation and it is hard to escape the dark projections that corrosive challenge brings. And the restraint it mandates.
In the past two economic crises, the respective governments have faced an obvious, and frankly, much easier political choice - to break out the cheque-book.
That was the imperative confronted by Kevin Rudd and Wayne Swan in 2008 even though Rudd had won by claiming he was a greater fiscal conservative than John Howard.
Yet the collapse of global financial markets threatened severe recession and Swan was advised by Treasury to start spending fast with the rather colourful language "go hard, go early, and go households"
This might have meant a reversal but it was hardly going to be unpopular. Ditto for Scott Morrison and Josh Frydenberg facing COVID.
Not so for Anthony Albanese and Chalmers though. The answers available to Swan and Frydenberg would only make inflation worse. This pain must be met with restraint - the watchword for this budget. The alternative was recently modelled by Liz Truss in the UK. Disastrously.
- Mark Kenny is The Canberra Times' political analyst and a professor at the ANU's Australian Studies Institute. He is a director of the National Press Club and hosts the Democracy Sausage podcast.
Mark Kenny
Mark Kenny is The Canberra Times' political analyst and a professor at the ANU's Australian Studies Institute. He hosts the Democracy Sausage podcast. He writes a column every Sunday.
Mark Kenny is The Canberra Times' political analyst and a professor at the ANU's Australian Studies Institute. He hosts the Democracy Sausage podcast. He writes a column every Sunday.
