One of the things I love about polling is it’s more than just a numbers game; it’s a moment when science meets art. There is the raw data and then there is the challenge of telling a story that makes sense of it.

The federal budget offers a similar indulgence for those who take their politics strong: a bland series of national accounts, but within the tables lie narrative arcs.

Budgets are set piece politics at its best. I vividly remember covering my first budget as a young reporter for a certain Murdoch tabloid in the mid-90s caught up in the whirl of self-importance.

The invite-only four-hour lockup where you are given the papers before they are submitted to the parliament to decode, vast screeds of documentation, spin from more treasury and political officials than you could poke an abacus at.

Playing politics with migration will doom Turnbull's hapless government | Peter Lewis Read more

The clock ticking, the imperative for everyone to get the numbers right, but also to make it into something bigger; the cartoonist working hand in glove with the economic writers and the editors to wrap all these numbers into a story that passes the public sniff test.

At their best, the budget numbers can tell a story that anchors a government agenda. And even when they don’t they can open up a whole bunch of conversations about an administration’s priorities.

From Labor’s Accord-driven compromises – such as the increase in super to 9% in lieu of wage moderation – to Peter Costello’s budget splurges, then his Future Fund as he ran out of ideas of where to throw the money the resources boom delivered.

From Gillard’s ring-fencing when the polls looked dire, locking in the national disability insurance scheme and Gonski funding into future cycles, to Abbott’s bald-faced ideology as he targeted the very weakest to meet his debt promises.

Budgets carry a truth – about a government’s vision, its priorities or its lack thereof.

The numbers aren’t the story, but they always hold a truth. Blowouts in public spending, corporations not paying their share of tax, every little initiative that shows that all sides of politics still aspire to use government to make lives better.

The interpretation of these initiatives next week will be carried out in the context of the prevailing national mood, which as this week’s Essential Report confirms, is not particularly ebullient.

There is a partisan split in these figures, but the more stark trend is the consistency in attitudes between the Greens and those voting others, groups that can be loosely described as the populist left and the populist right.

At a time when both major parties are grappling with challenges to their flanks, the feeling the economy has lost its way is both a key indicator and driver of this flight from the centre.

Budgets are also a chance to address such a malaise through the government’s spending priorities.

There’s lots of detail here but a few stand out.

People want to see funding for health and education; they also want to fund pensions and transport infrastructure – services, welfare and investment.

They are less interested in the prime minister’s formula of trickle-down economics via corporate tax breaks and assistance to business.

While housing affordability is an issue people want to see addressed in the budget, they also want to see the government take renewable energy seriously.

And we remain mean-spirited when it comes to foreign aid.

These results suggest any budget “announce-ables” are unlikely to cut through unless they actually create jobs or deliver better services.

Voters aren’t buying the Coalition’s business-as-usual approach – and anger is radioactive | Peter Lewis Read more

Because at a time when people are losing faith in the economy, the most coherent budget story will be about winners and losers and the cascade of beneficiaries.

As a separate question shows, the problem for the government is that most people expect their own interests to be the bottom of that heap.

Beneath the budget glitz and key messages, the story of the 2017-18 budget is likely to be what it doesn’t talk about – the impact of government decisions on the lives of ordinary Australians.

So my prediction is that this year’s budget story will be a story of consequences: the consequences of flatlining wage growth and reduced job security – not just hurting individual families, but stymying the broader national economy.

A story of the consequences of a government so locked into its own worldview that in order to fund its corporate tax cuts it is prepared to cut funding to the universities that should be delivering the innovation it championed at the last election.

A story of the consequences of a government that continues to put its faith in free markets and deregulation, even as its people lose faith in that project.

And if this is the story, it’s likely to be another chapter in the demise of this hapless government.