Nic Stuart | Anthony Albanese, Jim Chalmers budget asks us to look into the future

In particular we want to buy more health, aged care, and defence than we're prepared to pay for.

Something will have to give. But it's the very fact that this is the key budget take away demonstrates something far more important about Anthony Albanese's political smarts.

What he's achieved is something far more profound. He's changing the agenda.

Government (and, by extension, politics) is now focused on the big issue: how will we pay for the future?

Scott Morrison zoomed in on the moment. Everything he did concentrated on the present as if there was no tomorrow. His great marketing skill was to change the way we thought about politics. The long game was out as big questions were reduced to dot points such as, 'will you get a tax cut; yes or no?'

Simple dichotomies like this are great for news. They're immediate, they affect readers, and they generate headlines. By their very definition they entail conflict. They also utterly poison any attempt to address the big issues. Complex issues are shrunk into simple questions. How will this hit your hip-pocket and are you a winner?

It's easy to forget, today, how narrowly Morrison lost. Such skills nearly took him to victory. Although Albanese always believed his slow, relentless assault on the Coalition's legitimacy was the right strategy to win government, many were worried. Others wanted a dynamic leader offering a program for office, such as Bill Shorten offered.

The difference is Albanese knew he isn't the sort of person who can flick the switch to vaudeville and so he didn't bother attempting to become a charismatic leader and instead campaigned as an ordinary bloke. Without the huge success of the teals this would have ended in disaster, but that's beside the point.

Now he's PM and everybody, even a boy who grew up in a public housing estate (did he mention that) who becomes prime minister gets the chance to change the country. Albanese's reaching out and grasping the steering wheel. He wants to shape a new agenda for talking about the nation's finances.

It's attempted to do something different, by yanking our heads out of our wallets and forcing us to look into the middle distance.

Instead of the usual charts showing what this means for you, we're beginning to have mature decisions about what we expect from government because this is the real issue the country is facing.

Every politician knows we can't continue to afford all the services government currently provides without either (a) increasing the tax base or (b) finding cuts. It's that simple. The difference is that by getting Treasury to set out the broad fiscal parameters for the future, Albanese has now created space for him to control exactly this sort of conversation.

He understands we've reached the point where the only way the country can move forward is to reach broad principles about two simple questions: where is the money coming from, and where is it going.

That's why he overrode Treasurer Jim Chalmers and told him not to deal with the stage three tax cuts (benefiting those earning more than $97,000) in this budget. Of course they will never go ahead - but that's a different conversation.

Last week was all about trimming the sails and demonstrating that Labor is in charge of setting the course for the future. So although the budget did serve the immediate political purpose of getting rid of all that Coalition pork-barrelling (saving billions) and offering something to Labor voters (childcare), this is not the point. The budget's mission was to set the scene for a change of topic. This means focusing on the big numbers, not the little ones.

Take those tax cuts for high-income earners. People earning these sorts of sums won't pay any more tax anyway; they will simply pump more of their money into tax advantaged investments (including superannuation). The real point is to disperse wealth more equitably amongst the community.

The increasing rate of inflation (now officially 7.3 per cent, but in reality closer to 9) means the average wage-earner finds themselves working an extra month simply to mark time with where they were last year.

Rising interest rates mean the average mortgage holder now spends an extra month working for the bank. Add in a couple of weeks extra to pay for petrol, education, and electricity and forget an overseas holiday, even without the fuel levy that bites so hard into those points redemptions.

Hysterical demands to increase defence spending don't have much resonance when people are doing it this tough. Just forget it. Similarly with projections that the bill for the NDIS will increase by 14 per cent every year over the next decade.

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Chalmers says this "spending trajectory is putting incredible pressure on the budget". The decades-long push towards increased privatisation of education, medical, and aged care initially appeared to offer cost savings to government. Those have now been banked and only the commodity boom has permitted successive governments to pretend they are committed to returning the budget to surplus.

Although last week's document allowed another one-off windfall, our tax take is currently falling short by close to $50 billion a year. This money has to be borrowed (overseas) and increases debt, which raises the cost of borrowing. The only sensible political approach is one that governments of both stripes have avoided in the past - laying down firm envelopes within which revenue raising and, more importantly, spending will occur.

Albanese and Chalmers have established the framework for exactly this conversation. By forcing different interest groups to justify their own spending demands against each other, the PM will have successfully managed to place himself exactly where he wants to be: above the fray.