Were we all in the budget lockup as part of some sort of fermented cactus-juice experiment in the desert? Had Scott Morrison in fact morphed into Jim Morrison? There was a lot that separated this budget - sorry, plan - from any we've seen before. Annabel Crabb explains.

The universe shifted on its axis slightly this afternoon, when a federal Treasurer - possibly the first one ever to do this - stood before a pack of journalists in the budget lockup and explained that the tax cut he'd just announced was no big deal.

"It's not a great big tax cut," said Mr Morrison, of the $4 billion that will be deployed on lifting the threshold on the second-highest personal tax rate to benefit people earning more than $80,000 a year.

A treasurer? Talking DOWN a tax cut? What is this man smoking?

Mr Morrison went further.

"This isn't a budget," he explained. "It's a plan."

At this point, I started to wonder if we were all here as part of some sort of fermented cactus-juice experiment in the desert, and Scott Morrison had morphed into Jim Morrison, our fiscal guru.

"This isn't a Budget, man. Look again. It's totally a cantaloupe."

There were certainly elements of this budget that made it not like other budgets. In particular, it's not like the 2014 budget, which gave budgets a bad name and whose many errors this budget has studiously avoided.

Check out, for instance, how young unemployed people are treated in this budget. Scott Morrison has announced something called Youth Jobs PaTH, in which young jobseekers are given internships, paid $200 a week to train and then made tenderly more attractive to employers with a series of subsidies. Two years ago, the under-30s were kicked summarily off the dole and told not to come back for six months.

But there are other differences.

An average budget, for example, usually includes intricate tables spelling out how different Australian families will fare; double income no kids, family of five with a mortgage, retiree pack-a-day smokers and so on.

But this time, there was none of that. We have the Treasurer's assurance that lower-income families will benefit from changes to superannuation and the medium-term glow of job creation, but no tables. No tables!

One hardened cynic suggested that this might be because the Treasurer did not want tables graphically illustrating everybody north of $80,000 whooping it up with their tax cuts and their "no more deficit levy", while those on $79,000 and below whistled Dixie.

Guru Morrison hotly denied this. Tables and so on, it turns out, are for budgets. And this is a plan.

Working out winners and losers, said the Treasurer, was "the old way".

"The Australian people have moved on from all that."

He also was at pains to explain that the $6 billion the Government has saved from superannuation in the budget, sorry plan, was all taken from just 4 per cent of the population, and 96 per cent would be either unaffected or better off.

This is the most intriguing part of the budget, sorry plan.

It targets - for its savings - groups with little or no residual sympathy.

Multinational and wealthy tax avoiders: $3 billion, to be smoked out by a 1,000-strong task force within the Australian Tax Office. (Ideally, this role will be filled by old Border Force remnants from Guru Morrison's former life). Wealthy superannuation loophole exploiters: $6 billion. Smokers: $4.7 billion. (With all respect to Guru Morrison, the bit where smokers are gouged for another exponential tax increase - a packet of 25s will cost about $40 before you're not much older - is much more budgetty than it is planny. But perhaps we can forgive him this lapse, seeing as it's his first time.)

How will these proceeds be spent?

Part of the proceeds will be spent on giving small businesses tax breaks, in a hilariously long-term strategy that ends up with a blanket company tax rate of 25 per cent in 2026, by which time the Turnbull Government - if all goes well, of course - will be strolling into its fourth term.

Part on adjusting superannuation to suit low-income workers and workers who move in and out of the workplace - a significant win for women, who on average have only two-thirds the superannuation that men do.

Part will be spent building internships and wage subsidies for young unemployed people. It's a far cry from the 2014 Budget, which stomped in and kicked under-30s off the dole. Who says governments don't learn?

Resisting, for a moment, Guru Morrison's exhortation to forget about that old-fashioned winners-and-losers paradigm, let's run a quick check on how this Budget stacks up within the Rich v Poor, Bankers v Unionists, Top Hats v Hard Hats election campaign that will start pretty much while the ink is still drying.

The rich get a tax concession, amounting to about $5 a week. But will lose super loopholes and tax loopholes, and contribute many billions to Guru Morrison.

The poor will pay more for cigarettes through vastly increased cigarette excise - a measure even Health Minister Sussan Ley conceded last November equated to "a tax on the poor". And new welfare recipients will start off on a lower rate of benefit than existing recipients, as the Government has decided to divert the carbon tax compensation element of welfare payments to a special fund to pay for the National Disability Insurance Scheme.

But low-income Australians will benefit from superannuation subsidies, the potential of a job from a reinvigorated small business sector, and an ambitious-sounding youth employment scheme.

Guru Morrison is very confident that the company tax rate cut for small business - along with the Government's spending on infrastructure projects, submarines and so on - will stimulate growth in the economy.

So confident, in fact, that he expects nominal GDP - currently dawdling along at 2.5 per cent - to double to 5 per cent in two years' time.

Some forecasters would see this as optimistic. Or wonder what he is smoking.

As Jim Morrison's muse once wrote: "If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite."

Exactly.

Annabel Crabb writes for The Drum and is the presenter of Kitchen Cabinet. She tweets at @annabelcrabb.