Talk about sabotaging your own boat. Due into port on Tuesday night, the good ship Federal Budget is the leakiest it's been in a long time. Not unlike on other vessels in Australian waters, the holes in the hull are largely self-inflicted. The aim is not to send the passengers overboard so much as to disable the vessel just enough to ensure they (and, just quietly, the crew) are saved.

As shadow treasurer Joe Hockey put it yesterday, there's a more-than-ordinary leakiness about this year. ''It's like a hose out of Canberra at the moment.''

The not-so-surreptitious pre-release of budget bad news is all about managing expectations and making sure that the budget not only does what it's meant to do but that the Government gets credit, not blame. When Tuesday comes around and the boat finally pulls in, we are supposed to be appraised already of the sad state of its cargo and to focus, instead, on being rescued. The Government wants Australians to know exactly how bad it's going to get and how much it's going to hurt to fix things.

''There will be many howls of protest about things that we are doing,'' Prime Minister Kevin Rudd predicted on radio yesterday. But he knows the howls will be louder if he is seen to be not doing enough.

In hard times, there is an expectation of tough decisions. To go soft would be exactly the wrong way to play it, both economically and politically. The debate will be about priorities.

And so it will be a horror budget this year because both the state of the economy and the Coalition's successful past portrayal of Labor as ''all spending and no saving'' demand it.

For more, pick up a copy of today's Canberra Times