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Growth will edge up from 2.5 to 2.75 per cent and unemployment will peak at 6.5 per cent sometime in the next year then hang around 6 per cent for years to come.

Where might the new jobs come from? According to Joe Hockey from rapidly growing service exports, such as higher education, tourism, healthcare and financial services, silly.

Since small businesses are the biggest employers their assorted tax breaks should get the ball rolling but they better get a move on because these vanish in a puff of smoke in 2017.

The budget deficit will be slowly shrinking, and the gullible have been promised a surplus in four years but at least the markets should be pleased. Even so the S-word will come at a cost. The budget fine print admits "additional policy effort will be required to achieve the Government's target surplus of 1 per cent of GDP".

The budget was never going to mean all that much for the sharemarket, except the listed childcare stocks G8, Affinity Education and Folkestone Education Trust. Even then there's not much in it since they've already had their budget run.

Wall Street, which will probably have to grapple with a rate rise later this year, is a bigger consideration for markets, as is the recent rout in bonds globally.

As Treasury delicately puts it, "the pace and timing of rate increases may result in bouts of financial market volatility". You have been warned.

Property prices will also be immune one way or another from the budget. They depend on interest rates and the Reserve Bank, along with the growth in jobs and incomes, none of which it really changes.

So is it going to make you better off? There are a few bits and bobs but truth is, the only unequivocal winners are entrepreneurs because of the company tax cuts. It's what it didn't do, such as leaving super alone, you should be grateful for.

In just about everything else there are winners and losers, and not always who'd you expect.

Take child care. Stay at home mothers are possibly the only unequivocal losers apart from foreign backpackers, and multinationals. And don't forget the family tax benefit nasties from last year blocked by the Senate are still on the budget books.

But for $4.5 billion extra spending you might expect a few more childcare places, which for many parents is an even bigger problem than the cost. It seems the childcare lobby has a lot of clout because mum and dad centres are actively frowned upon.

I know the Government wants to provide incentives to work but please tell me why somebody on more than $185,000 needs a $10,000 top-up from taxpayers for childcare. Or why there's no annual cap on what families earning under $185,000 can claim.

Another loose end in the budget is that there's no limit on how many items costing less than $20,000 small businesses can claim before 2017 for an immediate tax deduction.

There are almost twice as many losers as winners from the pension asset test changes.

The combination of squashed thresholds and the steeper $3 for every $1000 in assets taper test also has some weird effects.

And so retirees with assets of between about $500,000 and $800,000 excluding their home are treated more harshly than millionaire pensioners.

Nor does lifting the lower asset threshold for the full pension in 2017 help as many pensioners as the Government claims because they're likely to fall foul of the income test. As the Combined Pensioner and Superannuants Association points out "a pensioner with a cash asset of $250,000 won't be better off by $1540 per year because the interest earned off their investment would reduce their pension under the income test". The budget did ditch the plan for September 2017 to slash the deeming thresholds for the pension. They'll be indexed to inflation again.

Apart from the new GST on downloaded books and movies, there were no tax nasties. Even salary packaging gets a boost with the removal of FBT on electronic devices. Just watch out for bracket creep.

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