I am driving to meet a family who have kindly agreed to watch Scott Morrison deliver his budget on Tuesday night and I’m stuck in traffic. It’s 7pm and we’re stationary on High Street, a river of twinkling brake lights ahead. I’m heading to Epping in Melbourne’s far northern suburbs, in the City of Whittlesea – groaning with growth, desperate for schools and roads and public transport. And local jobs, so people don’t have to sit in traffic to and from work. Few commentators, economists or journalists who will dissect and interpret Morrison’s second budget live in the City of Whittlesea, or places like it around the country.

Judgebir Singh, 39, arrived in Australia from India to study business in 2005, thinking he would like to stay if it worked out. It did, and in 2009 he became an Australian citizen, marrying Roop and having two children. He runs a Domino’s pizza franchise in nearby Thomastown.

Modern Australia is a mishmash. The Singhs are Sikh. Their children, Hermohi, eight, and Viraat, five, go to a Catholic primary school and Viraat races in and out of his bedroom to show off his Spider-Man toy and to work on an “I love Mum” Mother’s Day card. On the sideboard beneath a giant television where Morrison begins to speak – “this budget is about making the right choices to secure the better days ahead” – are two Buddha statues.

Singh didn’t expect much from this budget. Neither did Rebecca Cartwright, 41, a full-time worker in accounts who lives in Bundoora on the fringe of the City of Whittlesea. Or Kylie Lodge, 31, trying to put her marriage and her life back together in Mernda, a disadvantaged area right on the edge where the suburbs meet the paddocks.

Or Susan Sinclair, who works in real estate in the sweet original township of Whittlesea, and caught up on the budget on Wednesday morning on Seven’s Sunrise program. “I don’t think it matters which party is in,” she says. “The middle-income earner is the one who pays for everything.

“The budget probably won’t affect me. I’m still working, still paying tax, still putting into superannuation so I’m not ready to retire. I’m not unemployed so I’m not going to need a drug test.”

In interviews across this sprawling local government area, within the federal electorates of McEwen and Scullin, expectations of the 2017 budget were low. In political terms, the government might be pleased that there appears to be little fury, unlike the reaction to the 2014 budget, quickly labelled “unfair”.

The struggle to define the budget story – whether this has been a “sensible centre” moment which will reset a struggling government, a “Labor-lite” budget infuriating hard conservatives but pleasing for others who value the role of government – means little in the northern suburbs of Melbourne.

More money for schools is welcomed. The 0.5% increase in the Medicare levy – to fund the national disability insurance scheme – isn’t overly perturbing. “It’s not much,” Singh says. The levy on the big banks to raise $6.2bn over four years seems reasonable, although there is concern it will inevitably be passed on to consumers.

Even increased university fees don’t worry people too much because they are seen to be modest and nothing like the full fee deregulation proposed in 2014. Cartwright has paid back debt for a bachelor of science and a diploma in accounting and thinks her three children, aged eight to 15, will be able to do the same thing.

“The amount the courses are going up I find pretty minuscule compared to everything else going up that we’ve got to pay,” she says. “I don’t understand the fuss of paying it back because no education is free.”

If there is serious disappointment, it comes in two areas: the sense that the budget has failed to do anything meaningful about the prohibitive cost of housing, particularly for young people trying to buy their first home, and the big issue here: the lack of infrastructure to support a burgeoning population. Its symptom? Grinding, demoralising traffic congestion, a local and state government issue to be sure, but also a federal one.

Australia’s population is growing, with Melbourne growing fastest of all owing to a combination of interstate and international migration, especially a new wave from India and China. More than 100,000 people settled in the Victorian capital last year, with growth concentrated in new estates in the western and northern suburbs as well as apartments sprouting up in the inner city. The City of Whittlesea has just over 200,000 residents; by 2036, it is expected to grow to 330,000.

One reason the Singhs send their children to the Catholic school is because the local state primary school is so overcrowded; even so, it takes Roop an hour to drive them to school in the morning – an 8km journey.

Across the northern suburbs the same frustration emerges. “Rosanna Road is just congestion,” says Cartwright, whose children attend local public schools. “Plenty Road is congested. It’s just a nightmare.”

The budget announces the freeing up of commonwealth land in the suburb of Maribyrnong for 6,000 new houses. There is a big infrastructure spend, although Melbourne believes it has been short-changed compared with Sydney.

Here, locals want much more federal, state and local cooperation to cope with suburban growth. “If they are going to open up land for housing and development, they really need to look at the road infrastructure or public transport before they open them up,” Cartwright says. “There’s no use putting everybody out into these houses when you’ve got a two-lane road. It’s a joke.”

You can buy a three-bedroom house out here for $400,000 to $500,000, much cheaper than the Melbourne median. The price is a long commute in traffic, and the lack of schools and services. And it’s still a lot of money to pay.

Mahroof Noor, 61, is a chartered accountant at Melton city council and commutes more than an hour each way to work from his home in Bundoora. His 28-year-old daughter works in Melbourne’s central business district and is trying to save for a home deposit.

“It’s becoming impossible for our people,” he says. “Even the proposals they come up with, it will take another five years, seven or eight years, to save up that $20,000 or $30,000, and what will happen is that the prices will shoot up, they’ll always fall short of that amount.”

Cartwright and her husband, Greg, have a negatively geared investment property and are happy the government is keeping the scheme. But she is sensitive to the argument that negative gearing distorts the housing market. “I feel that families could negatively gear one or two properties, but stop negative gearing happening on multiple properties to make it more equitable,” she says. “We are helping to provide housing for families.”

Housing is a matter of stress for Lodge, a mother of two boys. Financial pressures contributed to her separating from her husband a year ago and she is on Centrelink single parenting benefits. She and her husband are planning to reconcile but her landlord has sold her rental property and she spent the weekend racing around to open days trying to find a new home.

Now she has to come up with $3,000 for bond and four weeks’ rent in advance. The property she has her eye on will cost $385 a week in Mernda, a suburb growing like topsy and severely short of services.

A budget is about figures but people’s lives are complex. Lodge is a trained childcare worker but has been out of the workforce for five years raising her children, aged five and eight – the cost of childcare made work barely worth it. Now she works 12 hours a week at the Jindi family and community centre, a modern facility in Mernda run by the Brotherhood of St Laurence and Goodstart Early Learning. It is a godsend in this area, working with struggling families, running a kindergarten and playgroup and helping people like Lodge gain confidence and skills to help them find jobs, and supporting them with financial and psychological help if they need it.

Lodge grew up in a family riven by domestic violence and alcohol addiction, and her needs are complicated – she suffers chronic pain from a hereditary condition. Still, she’s determined to gain skills to get her back into the mainstream workforce now that her boys are in school. There is public housing in Mernda but she won’t be applying for it.

“I wouldn’t even bother putting myself on a waiting list for a commission home, because you’d be dead by the time you get one,” she says.

“I’m hoping not to have to go on Newstart [unemployment benefits] and rely on Centrelink because I want to work for my family, [and] because it’s like a full-time job dealing with Centrelink.”

Lodge is sceptical about the populist elements of the budget, especially the notion of random drug testing for those on unemployment benefits. Dole recipients who fail drug tests would be given a cashless welfare card and possibly be referred to treatment.

“Instead of punishing them and cutting off their payments and giving them cashless cards, provide them assistance with rehab,” she says.

The drug testing idea – backed by little evidence that it might work – has some appeal in the City of Whittlesea. There is a strong view that welfare is a privilege and that “mutual obligation” is sound policy. This is not a wealthy area, and paying for bills and mortgages is a strain.

“I feel that it’s only fair, really,” says Cartwright of the trial. “There are people out there that need help with welfare, that is totally fine, but if they are using the money for the wrong means, then that’s not fair to everybody else who is needing the money.”

Singh, who worked punishing hours when he arrived in Australia, believes that Australians have become complacent about welfare, barely available in India. He thinks the government has the right idea about tightening obligations, and even random drug testing, but he is not sure how it will work in practice. “If they are not getting any money, what are they going to do? That [gives] rise to more criminals?”

Singh is interested in the budget and says he would have watched it even if the Guardian wasn’t coming to visit. He has a $400,000 mortgage and is always looking for new business opportunities. He came to Australia to “follow a dream”.

“From our family’s point of view, I can’t think I would be hit much by the budget,” he says. “There’s not much on offer for me and nothing has been taken away from me.”

That’s neutral then, which might please the federal government. “The thing is, it just looks like a pleasing budget,” Singh says. “It looks like a really clever budget.”