Do you know how your money is being spent? You might want to pay attention

It should not come as a surprise to know that I – a self-described budget nerd – maintain a spreadsheet of the nation’s treasurers.

Ranking them by length of service, the sheet traverses the 40 men to have held the post, from Gough Whitlam (just 14 days) all the way up to Peter Costello (11 years, 267 days).

(For pedants, I do not count Bob Hawke in the list for the single day he held the job after sacking Paul Keating and appointing John Kerin.)

I also keep records on some of the key messages delivered by treasurers through their annual day in the sun – budget day.

George Turner, the nation’s first treasurer and its 12th-longest serving, noted prophetically the weight on his shoulders, and those in Parliament House in Melbourne in 1901, when he released the first Commonwealth budget.

“I feel that the work on which we shall be engaged for some little time is of the utmost importance to all the people of our Commonwealth – not alone to those who are here now, but to those who will be here when we have passed away,” he said.

Turner spoke like the Victorian (both the era and the colony of which he was twice premier) he was. But his message still stands. A government’s budget is a covenant from current to future generations.

In the lead-up to, and in the days after, much of the political attention on the budget comes to the bottom line. Will the treasurer of the day reveal a nation deep in the red, on the path to recovery, or firmly in the black?

In this country, the state of the budget is a prominent political and economic issue.

Just travel to the United States, where Donald Trump is running a deficit of more than $US2 trillion ($2.8 trillion), to find a nation where the political class (and voters) have effectively given up on trying to put the country’s finances in some sort of shape. A reckoning is coming that will affect everyone.

But here, most Australians – even if they don’t grasp every element of our fiscal health – understand the importance of the government keeping the budget under control.

This month, the Resolve Political Monitor asked more than 2200 people whether they could remember who delivered the last budget surplus, and the year in which that occurred.

Twenty-nine per cent of respondents correctly answered that it was Labor, and Chalmers, who had the budget in the black a little over two years ago. Just 29 per cent.

More, 30 per cent, actually said it was the Coalition, while 41 per cent were unsure.