It's been said the future belongs to those who hear it coming. This government hears the future loud and clear.
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That's an upbeat Dominic Perrottet delivering the NSW budget last week.
His choice of rhetoric is strange – don't we normally see the future rather than hear it?
But it might have been another nod among several he made to taxpayers living with the inconvenience (including the deafening sound) of record infrastructure construction that has yet to deliver promised benefits.
This big spending budget suggests that the sound this state government is most afraid of is that of a runaway train of voter disaffection coming at it down the track, all the way from last year's Orange by-election to the 2019 state election.
You could say NSW is wired for growth.
The state's finances are in rude good health. The government is reaping a multibillion-dollar harvest from the game-changing "asset recycling strategy" of former treasurer then premier Mike Baird.
It's time for big-picture thinking, yet with its focus on school and hospital spending in listed towns and suburbs, this budget points to conservative micromanagement on the part of Premier Gladys Berejiklian in contrast to her risk-taking predecessor, as well as more than a whiff of anxiety about her re-election prospects.
The story is in the surpluses, projected at almost $12 billion over the next four years.
But with fewer assets left to sell, that includes $4.5 billion expected for 2016-17 shrinking to an average of $2 billion for the next four years.
It's still an enviable budget position – even "the envy of the Western world" – but for the citizens of NSW the question is whether the bonanza from never-to-be-repeated asset sales is being invested in assets that deliver better value to taxpayers.
This NSW government continues to book windfall revenue gains from the housing boom which, budget projections suggest, it expects to continue for the forseeable future.
It can be rightly proud of its strong fiscal discipline, of job creation that has outstripped other states in recent years, and of a 3.5 per cent economic growth rate for 2015-16 putting it ahead of all other states and territories for the first time in 26 years.
But if it remains deaf to the need for tax reform to set the budget on a sustainable long term course, we will all too soon hear the gurgling sound of responsible economic management going down the drain.