On the surface budgets are exercises in financial accountability. At a deeper level they are best understood as a yearly ritual that is performed, watched and soon forgotten. They are one of the ways in which rulers throughout history have acknowledged and tried to manipulate for their own benefit unchanging truths about state power.
The truth is that for all their apparently unlimited power, all rulers rely ultimately on the tacit acquiescence of the people. Although for a period they can rule by terror, tyranny or tradition, they will survive ultimately only if they are thought, correctly or incorrectly, to provide some benefit to the people. Rulers rely on ritual to persuade the populace that it is receiving a benefit.
For emperors to hold on to power in the Roman world they needed reliably to provide security and bread for the populace. The rituals designed to persuade citizens that this contract was being honoured included sacrifice offered to the gods of the empire, including the emperor.
Also among them were myth making about the eternity and benevolence of Rome even to the people it conquered, victory processions of military commanders bringing war booty on carts and defeated generals in chains, exemplary public executions, and the circus where largesse could be distributed and the weak, including animals, criminals, losers and Christians — despatched.
The shaping and the stridency or relaxation of these rituals betrayed the fears and shared values of rulers and ruled. Beneath them also was a measure of contempt by rulers for the ruled and of cynicism in return.
In order to endure, governments of all stripes today must still provide security and prosperity for the people. In electoral democracies they do not fear the mob but the polling booth. They have recourse to the rituals of myth making, public shaming, appropriation of sporting contests and military valour, and exercises of accountability. The last include budgets. We should evaluate these as ritual, concerned less with their stated intentions but with what the show of competence and generosity reveals.
This year's federal budget discloses a government anxious about its hold on power and doubting whether the people are satisfied the contract it has made with them has been honoured. Although little bread will be given out expeditiously through the budget, it has promised tubs of dough for later cooking and distribution. Lowly but productive citizens will receive a little bread in reduced taxes next year. In