The treasurer’s speech after a federal budget is a finely tuned piece of writing, and there’s much to be gleaned from sifting through the words.
Want a different way to look at the budget? I ran a couple of linguistic analysis programs over the treasurer speeches of the past two decades.
Here’s what it told me.
First thing to mention: references to debt are common after a change of government, as the treasurer complains about the situation they inherited from their malevolent predecessor. Thereafter, references to debt are inversely correlated with how debt is tracking. When debt is rising, as in the final years of the Josh Frydenberg era, debt is not mentioned! When it falls, pow, that’s when it shows up in the budget speech.
Read more about the linguistic analysis of Jim Chalmers’ budget speech.
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