Budget speech breakdown by the numbers

There is a lot of focus on the numbers within the budget, but our hard working researchers have dug deeper into the speech itself.

Producing estimated figures that should concern all Australians, especially those who have ever had to give a speech at work.

In fact we can even reveal that Chalmers said ‘Australia/Australians’ 40 times during the 25 minute speech.

Plenty of investment this year in broad jargonistic terminology, although variations on ‘broad’ were only used twice.

With nine uses of ‘responsible’/responsibility’, five uses of ‘strategy/strategic’ and six uses of ‘sustainable’: the presentation made sure to hit many standard important sounding words.

‘Important’ was also said two times.

Even the word ‘invest’ was used in some form 28 times. Averaging over one use a minute, showing a potential lack of thesaurus availability to the treasurer.

Variations of the word ‘grow’ appeared 16 times in the speech, variations of ‘strength/strong’ 18 times and variations of ‘resilience’ were used 12 times.

However variations of ‘fair’ only appeared five times. Suggesting a potential unfair bias against using fairness.

Perhaps he could have taken some of the 24 uses of ‘reform’ and shared those with ‘fairer’. Really bolster that number up. Bolster could also use a bolstering with only three uses.

‘Productive’ saw six uses and and ‘productivity’ saw nine, getting some good productivity out of those words.

‘Bowser’ (petrol pump) was only said one time during the speech. Probably because there isn’t many times you can really use that word in a budget speech.

Bowser (Mario) received zero attention at all. A clear sign that the government does not consider the monster a priority at this time.

But by far the most focus from the Labor Party was on the audience interrupting with ‘hear, hear’.

By our count there were 49 and a half times someone or multiple people yelled ‘hear hear’. The half being a time someone yelled ‘hear’ a mid-way through a sentence and didn’t commit to the double.

There was also one instance of someone mouthing ‘hear hear’ which we did not count.

Overall an effort that was truly ‘ambitious’ (5 uses).