Well, the budget was a great song and dance about very little. It wound back a 27-year-old Howard freebie to the rich, middle-aged which should never have been given in the first place and brought negative gearing and trusts into line with most other developed countries.

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What a sorry state Australia is in if that is called major reform. It was just one wind-back of myriad egregious Howard government handouts to mainly male, middle-aged or elderly, wealthy people. It was not reform - unless it is the first part of a project to unwind the 30-year dominance of economic "rationalism" that took so much wealth from the collective many and put it into the hands of the well-off few.

That resulted in higher taxes on labour, lower taxes on capital and the greater inequality that has manifested itself with so much resentment and discontent.

Some of it cannot be unwound. For example, the Commonwealth Bank, Qantas and CSL - owned by us all - were sold for a total of just $10.5 billion. They are now worth $320 billion, but in private hands. But changing the tax system with its perks and concessions can go a long way.

The budget was a small start. The trouble is that it is likely to have such a profound effect on the housing market that it might scare the government off more wind-backs of inequality-generating shifts in wealth.

The government will achieve its aim of housing becoming more "affordable". Treasury says prices will not go up as quickly as in recent years, but they would continue to go up. However, that estimate appears to have come from economic modelling uninfluenced by behavioural psychology.

Investors read changing data and look at changing policies and react to them. They often act as a herd - after all they are looking at the same facts and being advised by the same group of people: a herd of zebras looking at the same lion.

This is why you get occasional big, sudden crashes in a short space of time (sometimes less than a day) in........

© Canberra Times