The Budget confirms one thing that both sides of politics agree on. And that's their belief in the existence of an undeserving poor. Their message is that if you're poor it's because you're just not trying hard enough.
So the unemployed are left below the poverty line. Newstart has not received its much-needed boost of $50 a week. And a $700 million chunk of the surplus has been skimmed from the pockets of sole parents and their children.
You don't build people up by putting them down. You don't help them get work by forcing them into poverty. And you don't build a surplus on the backs of those who are already doing it tough.
There's nothing wrong with bringing home the bacon for middle Australia. But the people living at the rough end of Struggle Street are trying to get by on baked beans alone.
The young unemployed bloke scraping by on $35 a day (and we wonder why we he doesn't get a haircut before going for a job interview), or the single mum who has just been forced down to $38 a day on Newstart; they remain unheard.
The middle-aged mum or dad on low wages or no wages as they battle to re-enter a workforce from which they have been dumped like so much human garbage; they remain unheard.
A good Budget should at least be a step in the direction of putting a charity like St Vincent de Paul's out of business.
That is not the case with this Budget. The forgotten and excluded have not been heard. They've been answered, not with hope, but with a bucket-full of austerity.
We at Vinnies will always be there to give our fellow Australians a bit of a hand-up. But people don't want charity. They want dignity, whether they are in the low end of the labour market or outside the door, trying to get in.
At a time when they increasingly have to turn to charity, it is not charity they long for. It is justice.
Dr John Falzon is an advocate with a deep interest in philosophy, society, politics and poetry. He is the St Vincent de Paul Society National Council Chief Executive and a member of the Australian Social Inclusion Board.