Is this Australia's smartest politician? Get ready for more to follow his lead |
Jim Chalmers is wrestling a conundrum right now.
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One minute he is on top, the next, it threatens to pin him to the canvas. Even in his own party, a backlash is brewing as MPs, state and federal, feel the heat from electors.
The gently spoken Treasurer is hardly the "brawler statesman" he depicted Paul Keating as in a doctoral thesis, but as both theoretician and politician, Chalmers is Labor's best advocate, skilled in policy, politics and polemics.
The conundrum with which he tangles though trumps all of these. It is, in a word, trust, and the context in which it arises, heaves with irony. Newly determined to fix intergenerational inequality, Labor has backflipped from an explicit promise of its 2025 election campaign.
So, while honourably resuscitating the plausibility of home ownership and prosperity for Millennials, Chalmers' fifth budget simultaneously has tarnished these and other voters' trust in the reliability of this government and perhaps all governments.
This is not nothing. At a time of reckless disruption, it's a significant gamble. And that's before you get to the other frictions in this budget - things like the new minimum tax treatment of trusts.
Incorporating other asset classes into a reform that had been initially - and primarily - justified as targeting soaring high house prices, has become a major budget-sell embuggerance.
Labor MPs are nervous. Compromise seems likely. Retreat cannot be ruled out.
A viral meme-tide positioning Anthony Albanese as an unwelcome 47 per cent partner in businesses across the country has sprung up catching the government flat-footed. The PM has yet to find the right form of rebuttal, but it is telling that he was targeted rather than the Treasurer. That was clever.
Such is the new loucheness of public debate, however, that the meme's originators simply........