Frydenberg finds the balance in kitchen-table pitch

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg embraces his wife Amie before delivering the budget in the House of Representatives.

Josh Frydenberg needed to find the sweet spot in his kitchen-table pitch to suburban Australia.

And he may just have found it with instant but modest relief for families and pensioners in a budget that has also finally put the nation back on a post-pandemic path to fiscal recovery.

This is a budget document serving as an election manifesto that seeks to strike the balance between sharply competing interests while asserting good management rather than good luck got the country through to the other side of the crisis not only unscathed but stronger.

It provides responsible spending in answer to immediate and acute cost-of-living pressures, which Treasury has confirmed will not add to inflation, while mapping a path to budget repair that doesn’t kill the recovery, with significantly more of the record revenue dividends being banked than spent.

This is Frydenberg also trying to give the appearance at least that no Australian is to be left behind in the process while avoiding the image of a Treasurer throwing around confetti before an election.

The Treasurer’s challenge in this budget was to show rhetorical as well as spending restraint.

People’s experience of the real economy stands in stark contrast to the macro-level numbers.

The broader economic story is one of unquestionable success. It has performed better than all forecasts and outperformed all major advanced economies. Unemployment is also set to hit historic lows within months and wage growth is expected to improve.

The budget confirms the remarkable and enviable position in the world Australia now finds itself in. Frydenberg insists this is no fluke and the trajectory the government has put the economy on can’t be taken for granted.

There are risks to this growth path both global and domestic – and political.

The danger with framing an election platform on the theme of collective prosperity suggests to Australians, despite all they had endured over the past two years, that they had never had it so good.

This would have been political Kryptonite.

Frydenberg and Scott Morrison were faced with no choice but to do something demonstrable and meaningful about the cost of living. The sharpest electoral message the government needed to send from this budget was that it “feels their pain” – to inoculate against attacks that it was out of touch with ordinary Australians.

Cutting fuel excise was an obvious measure – despite the protestations of some economists. It worked for John Howard in 2001. With prices already predicted to start coming down anyway, Frydenberg may well become the beneficiary of a double-whammy political dividend.

The political challenge now rests with Anthony Albanese. For families to enjoy the immediate bowser relief and post-election cost-of-living relief on offer, the opposition must back legislation to be introduced on Wednesday.

If Albanese waives the budget through, consistent with his small-target strategy, he will have even less left in his own election war chest to fund Labor priorities – without raising taxes or ditching future Coalition tax cuts he had previously pledged to support.

This only sharpens the election contest over tax and spending in a world Frydenberg has sought to dramatically frame as a demonstrably more dangerous place.

War in Europe, global inflation, a pandemic that refuses to be done with and a series of natural disasters; these are the communal fears the Treasurer has sought to play to in his third budget within 18 months. And now was not the time to add menace to peril by switching horses, having guided the nation through a pandemic and an unprecedented economic shock.

“This is not a time to change course,” he says. “This is a time to stick to our plan.”

Frydenberg will reasonably believe he has got the economics right, the policies right and the politics right with his fourth budget, hoping to repeat the 2019 strategy that delivered the government a pre-election poll bounce ahead of the campaign.