Malevolent? Treasurer Joe Hockey says Fairfax Media's reporting of the budget has been sometimes ''quite malevolent''.

Fairfax has been trying to provide the public with what Hockey has not - a table that has been in each of the past nine budgets and was missing in this one. Introduced by Hockey's mentor Peter Costello in 2005, it was at first called ''benefits of new measures for families'' and later ''detailed family outcomes''.

It displays the changes in real household disposable incomes expected as a result of all of the budget measures taken together. It lists the results for up to 17 different family types, among them sole parents, single and double income couples, and couples with and without children.

It wasn't in this year's budget, replaced by a table that compared incomes in 2013-14 with those expected in 2016-17, and it was noted that incomes would be higher by then. What it didn't do is outline which family types would be better off in real terms and which would be worse off, as used to be done previously.

So using the freedom of information process, Fairfax asked for whatever so-called cameo analysis the Treasury had prepared, whether or not it was included in the budget.

It had prepared quite a bit: a 56-page ''initial cameo and distributional analysis of prospective policy measures considered in the 2014-15 budget'' in April and a 21-page ''cameo analysis of the impacts of the 2014-15 budget measures'' on budget eve.

Neither was provided to Fairfax, because they were ''brought into existence for the dominant purpose of submission to cabinet and were so submitted''.

Which means the cabinet knew. It knew which household types and income groups would be made better off or worse off as a result of the budget and kept this to itself.

The Treasury did provide a separate smaller piece of analysis that showed high-income earners lost less money as a result of the budget than those on low incomes. It is, as Hockey told breakfast TV, limited.

Hockey says this analysis ''does not represent the true state of affairs''. That seems unlikely, but if he wanted to back up his claims, he could make public the 56- and 21-page documents.

It would be surprising if they were incomplete. The Treasurer has them and he is able to release them even though for whatever reason he decided not to release their conclusions on budget night.

Until then, it is reasonable to assume the Treasury has come to the same conclusions as have other analysts who have attempted to work out how the budget affects different household types - that it hits low-income and disadvantaged households the hardest. But it's easily cleared up.

Peter Martin is economics editor of The Age

Twitter: @1petermartin