This is the budget of the Treasurer who has everything. You name it, Wayne Swan's selling it: increases in government spending, cuts in government spending, tax cuts and tax increases.
Which makes it the most puzzling, back-to-front budget I can remember. This is the budget that brings home the confusion.
Most people will find in it things they like and things they hate. Perhaps that means it will leave them more bemused than angry, but my guess is that Kevin Rudd will get the "howls of protest" he predicted.
Usually, budgets are pretty simple affairs, coming in two types. In times of inflationary boom they haul on the brakes, cutting spending and raising taxes; in times of recession they step on the gas, increasing spending and cutting taxes.
But Rudd has never been a man to do one thing at a time, so this budget tries to move in both directions simultaneously.
To alleviate the recession and limit the rise in unemployment, it announces $22 billion in new spending on key road, rail and port projects, as well as increases in the age pension and big tax cuts (well, they're big if you earn more than $150,000 a year).
But with this being our seventh tax cut in succession, plus what the collapse of the resources boom has done to tax collections, Swan is worried about the size of the budget deficit and how long it will take to get the budget back under control.
Hence his plans to cut back middle-class welfare by reducing superannuation perks, means testing the private health insurance rebate, and cracking down on abuse of the Medicare safety net. Not to mention hikes in the Medicare levy surcharge.
The trouble with this is it's all a bit previous, as the Poms say. The recession has hardly got started, we have only the faintest idea of how long and bad it will be, but already we're worrying about what we'll do when it's over.
It's as though we're planning the clean-up after the cyclone, even before the cyclone's hit. Surely battening down the hatches would be a smarter idea at this point.
Consider: this time last year the boom was rolling on and no recession was in sight. Twelve months later it's as though
the "worst recession since the Great Depression" is pretty much behind us and now we're terribly concerned about whether
the recovery will be strong enough to whirr the budget back into surplus.
Did I miss something?
It really is remarkable that so many people who'd normally be worried about losing their jobs instead are working themselves into a lather over the Government's (still small) debt. Send them a cheque for $900 and they're convinced the nation's on the verge of bankruptcy.
Usually in recessions there's an unceasing cry for the government to Do Something, Anything, but this time voters are either remarkably selfless or supremely confident the angel of unemployment won't be visiting them or theirs.
In its efforts to placate those people more worried about the peace than the war, the Rudd Government's got itself quite muddled.
This is a budget that gets us in deeper in the name of keeping sacred election promises (the tax cut, for instance), then breaks election promises (means testing the health insurance rebate, for instance) in the name of getting us out of the hole it's still digging.
All this, and the unemployment rate has yet to hit 6 per cent. We seem to have been viewing the recession through binoculars. We were cutting interest rates and applying budget stimulus long before it arrived on our shores.
And now the recession is yesterday's problem and we're planning what we'll do in the recovery.
But there will come a point where reality catches up with planning - a protracted period in which business failures and unemployment rise inexorably, but the authorities stand idle because all their bolts are shot. Doesn't sound like fun.
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