An expansionary budget that spends heavily on social services, steals Labor Party policy, and forecasts a big deficit. It sounds like Treasurer Josh Frydenberg’s 2021 federal budget. But it’s actually a near carbon copy 1963 budget of the Menzies government, delivered by then treasurer Harold Holt. The Liberal Party was governing in a “philosophical vacuum”, according to this newspaper. Here is The Australian Financial Review’s immediate editorial reaction on August 20, 1963.

The budget has been hard to understand, partly because the Treasurer gave so little explanation in his speech of the likely economic effects of what he was doing.