Back in mid-2014, a few months after former prime minister Tony Abbott and his treasurer Joe Hockey delivered their first, politically doomed, budget, Jim Chalmers found himself embroiled in a battle of words with then Treasury secretary Martin Parkinson.

The experienced bureaucrat who had worked closely with Chalmers when the rising Labor player was former treasurer Wayne Swan’s chief of staff, called out the opposition’s attacks on the Coalition’s budget. Labor was wrong, Parkinson said, to “exhort vague notions of fairness to oppose any form of reform”.