With her latest Budget Finance Minister Nicola Willis has joined some very unlikely company.

In 1972 then Finance Minister Rob Muldoon crowed that “I’ve spent it all for them”, meaning that there was no room for rash spending promises from Labour before that year’s election. In a somewhat more genteel fashion, former Finance Minister Grant Robertson deliberately set constrained forward spending allowances and booked $4 billion in savings and reprioritisation in the 2023 Budget. His intention was to leave the National Party with extremely limited fiscal room to fund its election promises without having to either cut public services or rely on highly optimistic economic revenue forecasts.

In this year’s Budget, Willis’ highly targeted new spending initiatives and forecasts of both an earlier return to Budget surplus and reduction in government debt levels are predicated on continued financial discipline supported by more solid economic growth, alongside an early end to the Iran conflict. At a blunter political level, like Muldoon and Robertson before her, Willis is also aiming to severely constrain Opposition parties from being able to make lavish election promises, without delaying the return to surplus and significantly increasing government borrowing.

However, there is one aspect of the Muldoon/Robertson line that Willis will not be keen to follow. Both Muldoon and Robertson lost heavily the elections which followed their 1972 and 2023 Budgets respectively.

Many of the initiatives contained in today’s Budget had either been pre-announced or well-foreshadowed. However, there were some carefully politically crafted surprises, for example, the record $5.5 billion boost to frontline health services and the lowering of the bowel cancer screening age from 58 to 56. Each addresses pressure points which have been the subject of Opposition criticism in recent months.

In a similar fashion, in education there is a substantial investment of hundreds of millions of dollars to maintain and upgrade the school property portfolio, including creating 4700 more places for students through new classrooms and expansions. Some of the $1 billion expected savings from cancelling the free university fees policy will be spent expanding the number of places in secondary school Trades Academies by 20,000 places by 2030.

Overall, with its moves in health, education and infrastructure, the government has focused its response on “big picture” solutions to improve the quality of life, rather than more specific household-focused moves like increases in Working for Families tax credits, or other more direct forms of family assistance. It is gambling that voters would prefer the government to focus on using its scarce resources to improve the basics, rather than household hand-outs.  This is in stark contrast to Labour’s post-pandemic large borrowing spree which went on almost everything but improving core health and education services and general infrastructure.

Willis and her colleagues will be hoping that with the deficiencies of the spending approach to the post-Covid19 recovery now apparent, voters will be more in tune with the disciplined approach she is advocating, and the earlier return to surplus and reducing debt it promises.

This in turn goes to the heart of another aspect of the Budget, far beyond its specific details. Modern Budgets are not just a statement of a government’s economic policies; they are just as much a statement of its political intent. So, not only does a government have to persuade voters of the economic credibility of its Budget numbers, it also must now persuade them of its political commitment to the policies outlined, and that they will be implemented. The Budget is therefore as much a statement of the government’s political agenda, as it is a recitation of the Treasury’s numbers and forecasts.

In that regard, its purpose is much more than just boxing in political opponents in election year the way Muldoon and Robertson did. It is about painting a picture that is broad but detailed, of the government’s future priorities and intentions, and then working to achieve them.

In this year’s Budget, with its big social and physical infrastructure investments and forward projections about the return to surplus and the reduction of debt, Willis is sketching out the broad details of the country’s immediate future, at least as the current government sees it. (Critics may well ask why it has taken until the third Budget of its term to get to that point.)

Although the Budget’s short-term to medium forecasts make it more difficult for Labour – when it finally gets round to it – to announce bold and expansive policies, the bigger immediate challenge for the government will be convincing voters in the just over five months until the election that today’s no-nonsense Budget has done enough to work for them.