All you people out there carping, put your honesty hats on for just a moment and answer this: Who among you would willingly put your hand up to become treasurer? Would you have the fortitude to walk the halls of power with a perpetual target on your back? I know I wouldn't.

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Weirdly, the job most sought after by political aspirants after prime minister is treasurer - even if it's the most thankless task in government. No matter how well you perform, you'll always face the daily chorus of complaint. Too much here. Not enough there. Every sector, every interest group with their hand out.

Add to that the constant side-eye from the paranoid PM who's convinced you're measuring up his office. And the fact you're the traditional deliverer of bad news because most of us ignore the good. On those odd occasions when you're brutally honest with the nation, you cop ridicule which can hang around for years and ruin your political career.

I'm not talking about Jim Chalmers; I'll get to him shortly. I'm talking about a string of treasurers before him from across the political spectrum who despite their best efforts will never be remembered fondly.

Readers of a certain age will remember Phil Lynch from the Fraser years, tasked with repairing the fiscal ruin left in the wake of the Whitlam years. In his 1977 budget address to the National Press Club, he confessed with rare honesty that Treasury forward estimates were "rubbery figures".

For ever more, he was known as Rubbery Phil. Seven years later that infamous admission spawned a comedy series called Rubbery Figures, which mercilessly lampooned contemporary politicians and their backers.

Paul Keating never fully recovered from his blunt assessment of the 1990 downturn as the recession we had to have. Brutal honesty - interest rates at 17 per cent made a recession a certainty - reaped brutal hostility.

One of our most successful treasurers was Peter Costello, whose big mistake was to deliver good news with a smirk which didn't go down well with Australians caught on the wrong track in the two-speed economy. His biggest clanger was the Baby Bonus which he sold as "one for mum, one for dad, one for the country". It fuelled a short-lived baby bump and a rush on flat screen TVs and dirt bikes.

The insult to Costello's injury was the thwarting of his ambition to become PM by John Howard's refusal to step aside until voters made that decision for him in 2007.

Wayne Swan might have helped steer Australia clear of the global financial crisis but the albatross around his neck was the amount of borrowed money that effort entailed - and the swift turning of Costello's surpluses into deficits. Despite being named Euromoney Finance Minister of the Year in 2011, Swan faded into relative obscurity after bowing out of politics.

Our least successful treasurer in living memory would have to be Smoking Joe Hockey, who defended the 2014 hike to the fuel excise with the........

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