How does Jim Chalmers’ speech compare with those of treasurers past?

Want a different way to look at the budget? I ran a couple of linguistic analysis programs over the treasurer speeches of the past two decades.

Here’s what it told me.

First thing to mention: references to debt are common after a change of government, as the treasurer complains about the situation they inherited from their malevolent predecessor. Thereafter, references to debt are inversely correlated with how debt is tracking. When debt is rising, as in the final years of the Josh Frydenberg era, debt is not mentioned! When it falls, pow, that’s when it shows up in the budget speech.

Surpluses show up mainly as the abiding obsession of Wayne Swan. (Has a man ever wanted something so much and so publicly failed to obtain it?) Swan’s obsession was fired by the conservative press, who relentlessly compared him negatively to his predecessor.

But the reality is that Peter Costello inhabited a golden age for revenue while Swan dealt with a very tough economic circumstance. By trying to drive the budget back to surplus prematurely, he made the economy worse. Joe Hockey did the same and it killed his tenure. It wasn’t until a little later — when Malcolm Turnbull took over as prime minister — that austerity fell from fashion slightly and budgets became a little looser. 

So how does Chalmers compare to Swan?

We can see that compared to his mentor, Chalmers likes to talk about people more than the nation. The micro, not the macro. But at the same time, the relentless growth of the national budget means he is talking more about billions than millions. Swan had to speak about recession, while Chalmers gets to talk about growth. They mentioned the word “government” equally.

What about “jobs and growth”? The first part of that famous duo is on the outer under Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. I guess you don’t really want to mention jobs when the fiscal and economic strategy is to increase unemployment. Growth is still a hot topic, but health — something you might expect Labor to be leaning on at this time — isn’t mentioned as much.

Chalmers won an election and stumbled into an absolutely lovely budget situation. That fortune is reflected in his positive tone. In fact, according to a sentiment analysis I ran on it, his budget speech was rated as the most optimistic one since Swan’s final effort. And with further surprise surpluses likely to emerge in future budgets, frankly, Chalmers has much more to be positive about.

One of my interests is the slow grind towards ever-larger numbers. Trillions sounded like science fiction when I was a kid, but now we deal with trillions daily, in science, technology and the economy.

You can spy the trend in the following chart: millions are in slow decline, billions generally climbing, and trillions are getting mentioned more and more often: twice by Chalmers. High rates of inflation will only accelerate this! I reckon it might only be a decade or two before we start to hear about quadrillions regularly.