You can tell a lot about a budget by looking at who it punishes. And basically, this budget targets anyone who's ever appeared on A Current Affair accompanied by a low, menacing soundtrack.

Banks! Big, greedy, bullying, farmer-persecuting banks. They'll be shaken down for $6 billion, to be poured directly — to the jeers and catcalls from a grateful bank-account-having public — into the parched well of Treasurer Scott Morrison's general revenue.

Foreigners! This budget will fine employers who hire foreigners, and pour the money into a giant $1.2 billion fund, which will train decent Australians, like the ones in the Bill Shorten ads, in useful new skills.

"We must skill more Australians to secure jobs!" declared Mr Morrison.

And it turns out foreign workers are going to finance Mr Morrison's skilling spree.

Foreigners will additionally be made to rue the day they were ever born anywhere else by copping new capital gains taxes ($581 million) and higher visa application charges ($410 million).

They will be pinged $5,000 if they buy an Australian house and fail to put someone in it (a measure that, it is understood, will be policed by a voluntary army of cheesed-off neighbours) and prohibited from buying more than half the units in any development.

A handful of giant foreign companies, the Treasurer shyly revealed, will be contributing $4 billion in tax revenue this financial year thanks to the "Google tax" he announced last year.

Also, we will be cutting our foreign aid budget by another $300 million, in order to beef up domestic security. Take that, third world!

Budget especially tough on drunk, stoned dole bludgers

Dole bludgers! Always a popular target, this category has been whittled by Mr Morrison's busy scalpel down to a narrow point of pure reprehensibility — this budget, he explained, would be especially tough on dole bludgers who are drunk and stoned.

"We will no longer accept, as an excuse from repeat offenders, that the reason they could not meet their mutual obligation requirements was because they were drunk or drug-affected," he explained.

Such non-excuse-havers, from now on, will lose half their fortnight's dole at the first offence, all of it at the second, and a month's suspension for the third.

(This measure, it must be said, feels vaguely un-Australian. After all, Tony Abbott once got so liquored-up he slept through several parliamentary votes on the Global Financial Crisis stimulus package, and we didn't dock his benefits — we made him prime minister!)

Another significant target of this budget? Bill Shorten, who will find it difficult to construct a spirited denunciation of a document — large tracts of which could pretty much have been written, at various points in the past five years, by the Labor Party.

As the Treasurer, inside the budget lockup, moved into his fifth sonorous minute of explaining how there is good debt and there is bad debt, one could almost hear Wayne Swan's intellectual property lawyers drafting the breach of copyright notification.

Roads! Nationalising the Snowy! Aussie jobs first! Bash the banks! Fully funding the National Disability Insurance Scheme! A needs-based schools funding model! If you closed your eyes, you could have been in the Caucus room.

The political effrontery of this budget, it seems, knows no bounds.

Its gout of nation-building even extends to funding the second Sydney Airport at Badgerys Creek — a project that was embarked upon three decades ago by Bob Hawke.

Mr Shorten can give a Gonski all he likes, it seems. It's when Malcolm Turnbull takes a Gonski that the game changes.

Non-ideological budget pursues Labor and Coalition schemes

"This is not a budget for ideologues; this is a budget for Australians who want the Government to do its job," Mr Morrison said in his press conference.

And behind the screech of the headlines, this is indeed a remarkably non-ideological document.

It pursues Labor schemes as well as Coalition ones.

It dumps $17 billion worth of measures from the 2014 budget — Mr Abbott's first — that had been hanging around so long they smelled weird.

It gives money back to the Australia Council and to community legal centres which were gutted in 2014.

It restores concession cards for pensioners and the indexation of Medicare rebates.

It cracks into the ancient Gordian knot of media ownership reforms by abolishing the licence fee for free-to-air broadcasters.

It even tidies up the age-old, ridiculous saga of the Mersey Hospital in Tasmania, which Mr Abbott as health minister bought for $1 in 2007, to demonstrate his new model of federal hospital management.

Ten years later, in this budget, Mr Morrison pays the Tasmanians $730 million to take the hospital back.

Life is strange isn't it?

When Mr Turnbull became Prime Minister, it was fancied he'd be an activist, a visionary — a prime minister who would wield a mighty sword and ride into battle.

It turns out what he's really quite good at is tidying up old messes.

He's a fixer, who snaps on the Marigolds and wades into the reeking, grime-encrusted political imbroglios of the past — even those on his own side — with an industrial-strength rubbish bag and a smile on his face.

He'll be punished for it internally, no doubt, but there are worse things to be.