But even if the Australian economy has rebounded far more quickly than the government and its advisers had expected, we are still part of a broader world - even with our borders slammed shut - that is consumed by COVID-19 to a degree that we here can perhaps only begin to imagine.

Five months into a year which began with supposedly "game-changing" vaccines, coronavirus cases are charging ahead by some 800,000 a day, as Mr Frydenberg acknowledged yesterday, and with the emergence of new and more infectious and deadly variants that mean the pandemic we hoped was nearing its end, may not even have peaked. This means that a global recovery is still some distance off. And for all the talk of "resilience", the present strength of the Australian economy relies an awful lot on previously unimagined levels of government spending, and an unexpected boom in iron ore prices.

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To indicate the improvement since October, government receipts for the year to June 30 have risen to $499.8 billion from $463.8 billion expected at last year's delayed October budget. And government payments will now total $660.8 billion, down from the $677.4 billion expected last year. This brings the deficit down from the previous prediction of $213.7 billion to $161 billion.

But the budget still predicts cumulative deficits of more than $342 billion over five years, and that's on a forecast doubling of wages growth to 2.75 per cent a year by 2024-25, despite years of such growth stubbornly refusing to appear.

Despite fears from the Opposition benches that a conservative Coalition government would switch from stimulus to austerity, the budget papers make it clear that the Morrison government's aim is committed to its present path. Long-term, it advocates fixing the national finances by growing the economy rather than increasing taxation.

At some point, political attention will swing back to the national debt. Even if the government is right to say that it's relatively low by international standards, and even if Treasury says the "cost of servicing this debt remains modest owing to very low interest rates", the amounts are still eye-wateringly large. Net debt might be the government's preferred measure but we still pay interest on the gross debt, which stands at $963 billion, or 45 per cent of GDP, with those numbers set to increase annually out to 2024-25, at $1.19 trillion, or 50 per cent of GDP. Our national interest bill, of more than $17 billion a year, will rise to $20 billion a year over that time.

But as things stand, that's the cost of a budget that the Treasurer says "sets Australia up for the future".

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