There was something for everyone, from the wealthy baby boomers to the unemployed. But the real question is: is anyone listening?

Just as Kim Beazley was rendered irrelevant by a palpable public switch-off every time he spoke, it might well be that Howard and Costello and their ilk are already there in that political limbo, awaiting their fate.

Just how far out from an election do the punters make their decisions? The tolling of the polls would suggest that a decision of sorts has already been made. Can it be wrested back?

It was a last throw of the dice, a desperate gamble at a catch-all budget.

No wonder the public is cynical. These climate change sceptics now try to appear green as though they have always been so. Costello seemed to choke on saying the word “ecosystem”, and for the first time in all of his dozen budget speeches, he at last uttered the words “climate change”. Is anybody convinced? (And poor old Peter Costello still can’t get the words of the song right – the Natural Heritage Trust rather than the National Heritage
Trust). Some greenie!

And what of education? We have a job skills shortage that is every day growing worse, and he pretends to address it, just as he has pretended to address the mounting crisis in higher education with a bucket of money.

Wait on. He is talking up our international reputation for research, and how he is boosting that even further. Wasn’t this the same government, via Brendan Nelson’s disastrous tenure at Education, that seized control of the Australian Research Council’s assessment agenda, entrusting it to a right-wing magazine editor and a former television newsreader?

And what about Costello’s new-found concern for our national dental health. Was this not the same government that slashed Commonwealth funding, maintaining that it was purely a state matter?

Sure, the Coalition stole Labor clothes, as Menzies was so good at doing, in its various funding of environmental initiatives, and its policy is riddled with code about job protection and inflation. (Translation: vote us out and the good times will end).

The Australian public has just had a bid made for its soul, a crass dollar-laden bid that says money can buy anything.

But the real question remains. Is anybody still listening?