What a sales pitch! Dull. Not visionary. Not even tough or "courageous" (as political euphemism would have it). Dull. "This will be a budget to bore you witless," Tony Abbott seemed to be saying this week. It will be a festival of tedium. A shrine to the uninteresting. Ignore it. Please.

This, of course, will not happen. No budget in living memory will be so anticipated because no budget has had such a politically self-destructive prequel. It's now simply a matter of record that last year's budget obliterated Abbott's electoral standing and emboldened an already unwieldy senate to dig in against him. Abbott may well regard that senate as "feral", but the only reason it can enjoy being so unapologetically difficult is that the public had first declared his budget to be feral.

The senators, far from irresponsible spoilers, were cast as valued protectors: guardians of civilised domesticity, holding back the savagery of a budgetary invasion. On some level, the government must know this. No doubt this is precisely why the government is now so desperate to be dull - and above all, inoffensive.

But paradoxically, Abbott's pledge of a dull budget is wildly ambitious. This is mainly because it is asking us to believe several contradictory things at once. First, that the Coalition inherited a budget emergency. Second that its job of responding to that emergency has been relentlessly sabotaged by the opposition and other senate riff-raff. Third, that in spite of this relentless blocking, the budgetary repair job has somehow been done. Turns out the opposition weren't blocking terribly much. Or that the stuff they were blocking was unnecessary to fix the budget, anyway, in which case they weren't as irresponsible as we were being asked to believe.