According to Mungo MacCallum, we have already seen denial and anger from the Prime Minister, who is currently in the process of bargaining (which will doubtless end in depression). The only question remaining is, what sort of acceptance will we see come 2016?

The one certain thing about Tony Abbott's first budget is that it has produced a lot of unhappiness, and not only among his political opponents; many of his supporters have been weeping quietly in their electorate offices, and among the public at large there has been general wailing and lamentation.

So it is entirely appropriate that Abbott is taking a methodical approach to dealing with the outbreak of grief; he is apparently working his way through its five stages, as identified by the Swiss-American psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross.

Fortunately for our Prime Minister, the first of these is a response at which he is both practised and accomplished: denial. Having summarily dismissed the science of climate change as "crap", he had no trouble in declaring that his own unequivocal and well-documented election promises were equally irrelevant: what mattered was his commitment to tackle Labor's debt and deficit crisis and bring the budget back to surplus.