Scott Morrison has emerged from hiding expecting a rousing round of applause for his new grand Budget centrepiece – assigning debt to Government departments.

The Treasurer might have played the invisible man act for two weeks, but his grand return to the public stage is nothing more than another fizzer.

It’s astonishing that the best he could come up with to replace housing affordability as the Budget centrepiece is a change to Budget reporting.

No amount of smoke and mirrors or changes to the budget accounting treatment can hide the Liberals’ Budget record – on their watch the deficit for this year has tripled, net debt for this year has blown out by $100 billion and Australia’s prized AAA credit rating is at serious risk.

It shows just how out of touch Scott Morrison and Malcolm Turnbull are if they think the Budget should be focused on accounting treatments instead of protecting Medicare; ditching unfair cuts to families and pensioners; scrapping unfair handouts to big businesses and millionaires; focusing on local jobs; and, tackling the housing affordability crisis.

Of course we are open to new ways to better invest in infrastructure given the Turnbull Government has slashed infrastructure spending.

We have considered our own changes to how debt is displayed in the Budget through our recent Better Budgeting discussion paper and will look at these changes in detail – but given all the problems with this shambolic Budget, this should be far from Scott Morrison’s top priority.