Regardless of what pronouncements Wayne Swan makes on Tuesday, Gang Gang is confident the shade of Sir Arthur William Fadden will remain unmoved.
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''Call that a horror budget? That's not a horror budget, I'll show you a horror budget,'' I can just hear him muttering in the best curmudgeonly fashion from that special corner of heaven reserved for chancellors of the exchequer who have spent less money than they have taken in.
I imagine it would be something like the Melbourne Club but with a touch more class, certainly a better menu and a much more exclusive membership.
Indeed, until Peter Costello eventually falls off the twig, I daresay Sir Arthur will be spending a lot of time on his own, reading the latest national accounts and pausing only to tamp more Borkum Riff Admiral's Flake into his vintage Peterson. Despite his upbringing as a son of the kirk, his father was a Presbyterian minister, I suspect a short tumbler of single-malt would be close to hand.
In addition to lending his name to one of our city's nicer suburbs, Sir Arthur also deserves the credit for imprinting the ''horror budget'' concept so deeply into the national psyche that it remains an instant headline grabber to this day.
Sir Arthur brought down more budgets, a total of 11, of both the horror and only moderately uncomfortable varieties, than any other federal treasurer before or since.
What is most remarkable is that he managed all of his achievements, which included a 40-day and 40-night reign as prime minister between Robert Menzies and John Curtin, as a member of the Country Party (which has morphed into the Nationals), not as a member of the senior coalition partner.
He was also, for the majority of his budgets, the deputy prime minister. A fervent anti-communist, Sir Arthur would have no truck with creeping socialism and made much of the Labor Party's plans to nationalise the banks in the late 1940s.
A member of the ''no-pain, no gain'' school of economic rationalism, he was probably the most vocal public advocate of budget surpluses until Mr Swan and, in October 1951, handed down a budget of such severity it would be remembered for generations to come.
He later wrote that as a result of the budget, ''I could have had a meeting of all my friends and supporters in a one-man telephone booth''.
Consumer demand, the result of aspirations that had been put on hold during the war years, was soaring and, as a result, inflation was surging to alarming levels.
In an age when people saved up to buy things, including new cars and sometimes homes, rather than to borrow, this was calamitous.
Left unchecked, an inflation spike would quickly destroy the cash reserves millions of people had accumulated over many years by cutting their private spending to the bone.
To Sir Arthur the solution was obvious. He slashed government spending and increased income taxes by 10 per cent in a ''horror budget'' designed to deliver an ''anti-inflationary'' surplus of £114 million ($175 million).
''Doc'' Evatt, to borrow the parlance of Bart Simpson, ''had a cow'' and it was on for young and old. The colourful opposition leader accused the Menzies government of drawing up a wartime budget at time when the country was at peace.
''Approval of this (surplus) budget will imperil the national credit of Australia, which has fallen to a very low ebb,'' he told The Canberra Times.
How times have changed. Now the fear is that a deficit budget could have that effect.
Sir Arthur went on to deliver a succession of ''tough love'' budgets and his 1954 effort was singled out for special mention at the time.
''The budget is a niggardly … useless thing,'' the member for Parkes, a Mr Haylen, said in the House of Representatives. ''It is the horrible little sister of the horror budget (of 1951).''