Even Australia's politically virtuous ''working families'' are over being bought off, if the response to Wayne Swan's budget is any guide.

The most striking aspect of the Age/Nielsen survey of the public response to the budget is that what politicians feared doing for years is seen as perhaps the budget's most successful and defining feature.

Asked about the decision to dump the (formerly non-means tested) $5000 payments for a first child (reduced last year to $3000 for subsequent babies), 68 per cent of respondents backed the move with just 27 per cent opposed.

Majority support for dumping the cash bonus, ridiculed as the most blatant of all the vote-buying ''middle-class welfare'' measures built up during the ''rivers of gold'' resources boom, was evident across all age groups.

That opposition applied across all party affiliations, although parents of child-bearing age were coolest on the change for obvious reasons.

The bonus has not been completely abandoned. An extra $2000 will be added to the entitlements of recipients of Family Tax Benefit (A) after the birth of a child.

Follow the National Times on Twitter