In these bizarre times, fury is being directed at the opposition. The Liberal legacy is collapsing |
In these bizarre times, fury is being directed at the opposition. The Liberal legacy is collapsing
May 14, 2026 — 5:00am
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Pass the smelling salts: an Australian government has used a budget to reorganise the economic system and, by implication, the society. What Treasurer Jim Chalmers and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese delivered on Tuesday is not a comprehensive rebuild. You couldn’t even describe it as extensive – not yet anyway. But it is a definitive attempt to bring down the curtain on an era and begin a new one.
The leading figure in the old era was John Howard. There is enormous nostalgia for the Howard days not just among what’s left of the Liberal Party but in large parts of the media and among economists. It was a stable government, with its prime minister, treasurer and foreign minister occupying their posts through all four terms of office. It changed the country.
On its election in 1996, it nominated as one of its key goals the creation of an “investor society” in which most ordinary folks in the suburbs and the regions – so-called mum and dad investors – took out shares and relied on their investments to build wealth along with whatever they earned through their labours. The privatisation of Telstra kick-started that process. The introduction of the 50 per cent discount on capital gains tax followed in 1999, turbocharging property as an investment in tandem with negative gearing. Increasingly generous changes to the tax treatment of superannuation were another element.
Over a quarter of a century, these changes worked well for many Australians – possibly too well. Housing prices rose at a........