Australia's greatest cricketing all-rounder Keith Miller famously skewered the exaggerated pressure of sport.
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"There's no pressure in Test cricket," the former WWII RAF pilot told Michael Parkinson.
"Real pressure is when you are flying a Mosquito with a Messerschmitt up your arse."
Fair point.
Still, as any HSC student can attest, pressure is contextual. Even the experienced Anthony Albanese wobbled at the outset of the election campaign over numbers.
It was far from fatal, though many behaved as if it were.
Treasurer Jim Chalmers faces intense scrutiny this week with his first federal budget, although it is not pressure he seems to feel so much as equanimity.
This column has obtained notes from private comments he made to Commonwealth Treasury over pizza on Thursday evening - regarded as the "push" night for officials as they draw the final document together.
In a series of generous and, at times, self-deprecating remarks, the novice Treasurer praised the intelligence and unyielding dedication of bureaucrats admitting he may get the odd detail awry amid the ocean of words he will utter in Parliament, in press conferences, and across countless broadcast interviews.
"One of the reasons that I feel pretty calm and pretty confident about the budget - I'll get things wrong next week and all the rest of it - but the heart rate isn't up because I know all the work and all of the effort that you've put into it. I feel part of a big team effort - yourselves, across the public service, in the cabinet, in the expenditure review committee - I feel like we're all part of something really big," he said.
It's a key moment for any new treasurer because it carries with it real-life implications for millions of Australians.
And, it shoulders nothing less than the political standing of the government as well. You can't win the next election with your inaugural budget, but history shows you can go a long way towards losing it. Yet budget No.1 is also the farthest one from the next poll, and thus the budget in which structural changes can be dialled in to make a lasting difference.
In May 2014, Joe Hockey had ridden with Tony Abbott to a thumping majority in the September election just months before, only to flush that capital away with a savage first budget heaving with broken promises and bravado. The blurb boasted of making $80 billion cuts to health and education, in a plan long on hardship for many people already struggling.
Like the freshly dumped UK PM Liz Truss, whose premiership was doomed from the moment she enacted her ideological fantasy-budget of big tax cuts for the rich funded by borrowings, Abbott's authority was spent the moment he and Hockey set out the budget plan for 2014-15.
Pressure comes in different forms. It provides focus and intensity where needed but it can also produce missteps, errors of judgement, hubris and skewed interpretations.
Yet Dr Chalmers - he has a PhD from ANU - exudes the confidence of a man at one with his subject and safe in his ability to carry an argument.
As a former top adviser to Wayne Swan, he's been around the Treasury and the budgeting process for many years.
It's given him a broader perspective informed by a wealth of past triumphs and mistakes, and by the necessarily collaborative nature of budget formulation.
Perhaps a Labor treasurer, given that party's collectivist traditions, is more inclined to express such magnanimity, but Chalmers' comments to the assembled officials of Treasury paid unusually strong credit to their authorship.
"I've always been a little bit uncomfortable with this idea that the person who reads out the speech on the Tuesday night is somehow responsible for the budget. I see it as this massive, collaborative effort," he told Treasury's top boffins.
Noting a number of his ministerial staff had been drawn from Treasury and Finance, Chalmers stressed what he called "the immense privilege to work with this brainpower and this commitment from people who are here and who have been working so closely in the budget".
"You're all immensely talented, intelligent people. You could probably write your own ticket professionally and the fact that you are here through the night doing really high-pressure work, mad deadlines, here around the clock, that is inspiring, too," he said.
However, it wasn't Keith Miller Chalmers cited in his remarks but another sporting great, the American tennis ace, Billie Jean King.
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"My advice, what I've learned over the course of doing these off and on since 2008, is you've got to look for sources of inspiration. I know from being around the place that some of you are 'affirmation' people like I am. The one that I think about is that tennis player from another era Billie Jean King who used to say, 'Pressure is a privilege. Pressure is a privilege'," he said.
There is a palpable sense about Chalmers that he is unusually present. That he is determined to respect this period fully, acknowledging his privileged place in the nation's history in real time.
For public servants, it represents something else, too. A marked change from the antagonistic stay-in-your-lane messaging of Scott Morrison which amounted to, 'We do the policy imagining, you stick to delivery'.
A change that is both atmospheric and substantive.
- Mark Kenny is The Canberra Times' political analyst and a professor at the ANU's Australian Studies Institute. He is a director of the National Press Club and hosts the Democracy Sausage podcast.
Mark Kenny
Mark Kenny is The Canberra Times' political analyst and a professor at the ANU's Australian Studies Institute. He hosts the Democracy Sausage podcast. He writes a column every Sunday.
Mark Kenny is The Canberra Times' political analyst and a professor at the ANU's Australian Studies Institute. He hosts the Democracy Sausage podcast. He writes a column every Sunday.
