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In the early days of the Hawke Government, when Labor and a dynamic young treasurer, Paul Keating, kept confounding a hostile and suspicious business community with market-friendly policies, the cartoonist Patrick Cook would draw the then former treasurer John Howard as a battle scarred veteran.

Howard was covered in plasters and bandages of the battles — of which the legends grew — that he'd had with his prime minister Malcolm Fraser, to try to push a deregulatory agenda that was then sweeping other parts of the Western world.

By the time Paul Keating was handing down budgets, Cook's Howard had been reduced to a legless but heavily medalled old warrior on a skateboard, glumly looking on as his Zegna-suited successor strolled past, declaring nonchalantly there was "nothing to it".

Howard may have, and did, claim the satisfaction of seeing the agenda he wanted implemented. He had won the war, it seemed. But in politics it is often hard to see beyond the victories of individual battles.

So spare a thought for Wayne Swan, as he watched Josh Frydenberg almost nonchalantly dump a decade of debt and deficit warfare on Thursday and declare that the overwhelming economic target of the government needs to be jobs, and that the focus of budget policy had to be on keeping the economy ticking over until we got to even lower levels of unemployment than existed before the pandemic.

We couldn't reduce government spending, Frydenberg told us, even when employment growth was even stronger than it had been before.

Just like that! All the things that Labor had said in the GFC — for which it had been relentlessly attacked for profligate spending — were suddenly all the Coalition rage.

Read more:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-05-01/frydenbergs-budget-pivot-puts-government-on-path-for-judgment/100106604

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