You get the feeling this budget was pulled together with the use of a checklist. "We've got to have something on super, bracket creep, women, company tax, cities, multinationals, infrastructure . . ."
It involves a lot of imminent-election tidying up of loose ends from projects the government has supposedly been working on for three years, plus much squaring away of key interest groups.
What it's not is any kind of carefully considered "plan" for the economy, whatever Scott Morrison's claims.
It is, of course, a plan to get Malcolm Turnbull re-elected. Its measures are much more easily explained in political terms than justified as doing wonders for "jobs and growth".
Coming from the man in whom we held so much hope, it's uninspired and uninspiring. It's neither agile nor innovative, with not a spark of greatness.
That doesn't make it a bad budget, however. It's competent. It will play its part in ensuring the economy keeps chugging on for another year.
It contains all the Coalition biases you'd expect in a Coalition budget.
It's a cautious budget, with little to which many people will take great exception. Most voters' pockets won't be greatly affected one way or the other - certainly not in the near future - which, of course, is the reason for the caution.
If you believe the government should be pressing on with reducing debt and deficit - as it repeatedly promised it would - the budget is a great disappointment.
Turnbull and Morrison have achieved little more than their Coalition predecessors did. They inherited from Labor an expected budget deficit for 2013-14 of $30 billion (or 1.9 per cent as a proportion of gross domestic product).
Now Turnbull and Morrison are expecting a deficit of $40 billion (or 2.4 per cent of GDP) in the present financial year, falling only to $37 billion (2.2 per cent) in the coming year.
They expect government spending to grow by 4.7 per cent and tax revenue by 5 per cent.
Morrison boasts that the budget "outlines a path back to surplus", but that's true of every previous budget, back to the one Julia Gillard took to the 2010 election. The path first supposed to end in 2012-13, now stretches to 2020-21 - if you can believe it.
Up to now, the slow progress is explained partly by continuing falls in export prices. Much of what progress the Coalition has made is explained by it keeping the proceeds of bracket creep.
The truth is Turnbull and Morrison have abandoned any attempt to cut the deficit. Their best effort is to avoid doing anything that adds to it, while they wait for nature - "growth" - to take its course.
But while this lack of enthusiasm for the axe will disappoint those who've been convinced our debt is perilously high, I'm not among them. Morrison is right to say the "transitioning" economy is still too "fragile" to cope with public sector slashing and burning.
To that extent the budget wins high points for its steady contribution to the management of the macro economy.
It doesn't win many points for fairness, however. We now know what more than three years' big talk about tax reform adds up to: not a lot.
Low to middle income-earners have been saved from an increase in the goods and services tax, but gain nothing.
For years we've been told bracket creep is a terrible thing, hitting people on low taxable incomes harder than those on high incomes.
So what's the remedy? A tiny tax cut which, because it starts with people on more than $80,000 a year, will benefit only about the top quarter of taxpayers.
Thus the government gets to keep all the bracket creep to date and most of the bracket creep to come. But remember, only Labor stands for higher taxes.
What else do high earners get? No reneging on ending the 2 per cent temporary deficit levy. No change to negative gearing schemes, to the 50 per cent discount on capital gains tax, to family trusts or to deductions for professional development courses in Hawaii.
Big business missed out on its longed for increase in the GST and on a cut in the top rate of income tax but, even so, did get the promise of a company tax rate falling by 5 percentage points to 25 per cent, starting in the early 2020s and continuing until 2026-27 - if you can believe it will happen.
The big exception to this, however, are the changes to superannuation tax concessions, which will be less generous to high earners and less mean to women and low earners.
In other key areas of reform - particularly improved effectiveness in healthcare, education and infrastructure - after three years the government has hardly scratched the surface, with little further progress in the budget.
"Jobs and growth" is a slogan, not a plan. Its purpose is to create the illusion of a busy, striving government and divert attention from the lack of progress in achieving the much-promised return to budget surplus.
Name the budget - or the government - that hasn't claimed to have jobs and growth as its overriding goal.
To claim that a tiny tax cut and a "glidepath" cut in company tax will have any significant effect on jobs and growth is an exercise in over-optimism and exaggeration.
The tax cuts for small business, and their extension to a relative handful of medium businesses, is more about politics than jobs and growth. Small businesses have votes; big business has most of the jobs.
This is not the budget we were entitled to expect when Turnbull ousted Tony Abbott last September.
It's probably better than Abbott and Joe Hockey would have delivered, but only by a bit.
This is the last of three budgets from a government seeking re-election on the basis that only the Coalition is any good at managing budgets and running the economy.
That was a lot easier to believe at the last election than it is today.
