Jim Chalmers is drawing a long bow evoking Ben Chifley ahead of fourth budget

Former prime minister Ben Chifley and Treasurer Jim Chalmers.

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In talking up Tuesday’s budget, Jim Chalmers and Anthony Albanese have drawn upon the great historical precedent of it being only the fourth budget in a single term since Ben Chifley’s four ­budgets 75 years ago between 1946 and 1949.

Last week, the Treasurer said his fourth budget was a welcome and rare opportunity, adding: “For the first time since Chifley more than three-quarters of a century ago, there’ll be four budgets in one term.”

On Tuesday, the Prime Minister picked up on the historic fourth budget, which was also introduced just before the federal election of 1949. But Chalmers and Albanese are drawing a long bow with the Chifley parallel as they launch into a big-spending budget that doesn’t really cut debt and threatens another inflation outbreak as international uncertainty and trade wars raise global recession fears.

Chalmers said the four-budget term was “welcome because it puts the economy front and centre, on the eve of an election, and brings our policies and plans together”.

As treasurer and then prime minister and treasurer through World War II and into the peace and rebuilding of the later 1940s, Chifley won a reputation as a sound economic manager with a determination to look after working Australians with job creation, welfare support and tax cuts.

Chifley introduced uniform federal income tax, created the Welfare Act, the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, central bank guidelines, the Australian National University and the Snowy Mountains irrigation scheme.

But he also warned that government spending, which had to be raised during the crisis years of the war, could not be allowed to continue indefinitely and risk renewed inflation and economic ­recession. He also declared that there was a limit to how much personal income taxes could be used to fund spending.

Chifley described treasurers as “notoriously unpopular” even with their colleagues because “nobody wants to give them anything, but everybody wants to get something from them”.

So far this year Chalmers has “given” Albanese and his colleagues at least $60bn in extra spending with “more to come” in the election campaign after the budget. Chifley also defended lifting taxes and spending at a time of crisis but warned that if taxation became too high it was “impracticable” and that spending risked ­reviving inflation and leading to a recession.

Despite Labor’s reworked tax cuts last year the failure to implement the full reforms to limit personal income tax brackets will fund future spending as workers pay more. Chifley’s “frugality” led a colleague to claim: “It’s almost impossible to get money out of Ben. You’d think it was his own.”

But, despite cutting taxes and expanding welfare, Chifley also repaid debt.

In the final budget, Chifley pointed to a cut in interest payments from £23m to £15m. He also planned for a massive immigration program – an extra 200,000 people into a country of just over seven million – with a vision of Australia moving to a nation of “20 million” as he developed the coal industry and agriculture.

“These dual efforts to increase our population and to develop the greatest resources of Australia should, I think, be regarded as the keynote of the national economic policy now and in the year ahead,” Chifley said after the 1949 budget.

When it comes down to it, the parallel of the fourth budget of ’49 in one term is really only the timing and not the substance of cutting spending, avoiding inflation, and really reducing debt.

One parallel Chalmers won’t want with Chifley is the election result in ’49: he lost the election held straight after that year’s budget.