Car Finance Australia | Bryant's Australia

While Kevin Rudd has always seemed to me to have the look of a European finance apportion - of Norway, say, or maybe Belgium - it is the Treasurer Wayne Swan who in new weeks has sounded similar to one.

For all the admiring speak over these shores of an mercantile consternation from down beneath and the resumption of the China-fuelled resources boom, Mr Swan's pre-budget musings lifted the spook of a word not routinely related with Australia: austerity.

Hardly European purgation measures, it has to be said. By general standards, the size of the shortage is tiny - about 3.5% of GDP. But poignant cutbacks in supervision spending yet that are written to bring the bill back to excess by the center of 2013. That would make Australia the initial modernized republic to lapse to excess after the universal financial crisis.

This seems to be as ample a diplomatic objective as an mercantile one. Just as Kevin Rudd favourite to execute himself as an "economic conservative", Wayne Swan and Julia Gillard have turn contentious shortage hawks. It gives them a few insurance against the assign that they have the fiscal open-handedness of a soldier on seaside leave, the normal tax-and-spend assign leveled against Labor by the Liberals.

So Swan has been heightening his talons - ornithologically improper as that sounds. On that front, I'm astounded there have not been more "Back-to-the-Black Swan" references. It sounds similar to Natalie Portman's next film project.

The warnings have been of "substantial savings" , of a gratification crackdown on spongers and "bludgers" and of rivers of bullion from the mining bang spot II that no longer upsurge with considerably the same strong rumble as of old.

So after all the spin and counter-spin in the run-up to the "back-to-the-black" bill - that in Australia is the great set-piece eventuality of the diplomatic calendar, a type of quasi-State of the Union - what obviously happened?

For a start, there were cuts of more than $A20bn ($21.6bn, 13.2bn) in the budget, but they were not as swingeing as previewed, that should frequency advance as a surprise. The Australian is mission this a "nip and tuck" bill of "thousands of tiny cuts". The ABC economics match Stephen Long, who can always be relied on to advance up with the pithiest of phrases, called it as "tough as tofu" . Better still, he quotes from the lyrics of Lou Reed: "Vicious - you strike me a flower."

Furthermore, you can right away put a figure for what Australia's summer of disasters cost the economy: $A9bn in mislaid output. With the overlapping effect of the Japanese and Christchurch earthquakes, of a commission indicate will be taken off mercantile growth.

Even even though Australia managed to prevent retrogression after the universal financial predicament - the consternation from down under's many toll brag - the GFC has strike the manage to buy hard. Some $130bn in mislaid revenue. The predicament was "larger and slow longer", Mr Swan told those bad Canberra reporters kept lock-down is to afternoon whilst they were since an advance read-through of the bill - a journalistic form of compulsory internment that, thankfully, I have always managed to avoid.

A summary running by the bill was that the Australian manage to buy cannot go on to rest on the resources bang for its revenues - partly because the mining giants, similar to Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton, are investing so heavily in infrastructure, for that they take taxation deductions. It helps notify the stress on practice in the bill and the retooling of the Australian workforce. This bill was about "jobs, jobs, jobs", mentioned Swan.

Clearly, not everybody is cashing in from the resources boom, and he moreover remarkable that Australia right away has a twin-speed manage to buy - he called it a "patchwork economy".

On the spending front, the large leader was mental health. One third of Australians will experience a few form of mental sickness during their lives.

The back-to-black bill was not particularly green, with extra savings by shelving the Green Car Innovation Fund. Politically, that's tricky, since that the Greens will grip the change of power in the Senate from July onwards.

Finally, this was a politically prudent bill from a minority supervision that does not have the figures to be politically bold.

For those meddlesome in the nitty dirty of the budget, I am considering you will have looked elsewhere. The ABC has a thorough outline . You can moreover read the full debate here .

It was the initial bill where I eavesdropped on the Twitter conversation. "Do they lay around and watch Budget Night on TV in other countries?" asked Caroline Overington of The Australian. "It doesn't appear cool, somehow."

No they don't, I suspect, and no it doesn't.