Amid the blizzard of spin being pumped out by Treasurer Jim Chalmers and his boss Anthony Albanese after the Budget, the biggest cost is clear.
It is the total destruction of trust.
The fallout from the pair’s blatant broken pre-election promise not to change negative gearing and capital gains tax concessions will long stay with them.
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And rightly so. These were policies which had been used for decades by investors in property. Good old bricks and mortar.
It had been seen — correctly — as an accessible and reliable way to build up a family nest egg.
The Albanese Government spin about “intergenerational equity” seemed intent on villainising those mean-old filthy rich investors — yes you, Boomer — for ruining the chances of young people to get a toehold on the property ladder.
And yet the truth is the two policies had been accessed by ordinary, average Australians. Teachers, nurses, police, tradies.
They had worked hard, saved hard, and put some of that into an investment property.
That pathway now looks different. It is a pathway that Mr Albanese swore over and over again would not be altered as he sought to win the 2025 election.
Those assurances were given because Labor was petrified of repeating the experience of former leader Bill Shorten, who lost the 2016 and 2019 elections — the latter considered unlosable — with a plan to limit negative gearing and dilute capital gains tax concessions.
And so Mr Albanese repeatedly proclaimed the Shorten blueprint was dead and buried.
We are now expected to believe that things have changed so much in the past 12 months since the 2025 poll that Labor has suddenly found the changes are crucial? Oh Please!
The only thing that has changed is that the 2025 election delivered them a massive majority. A backlash buffer.
This is now a Government without a shred of credibility.
The idea that a party goes to an election with a pledge and then sticks to it is all but dead.
They have delivered exactly the kind of cynical politics that has helped to drive disenchanted voters into the arms of One Nation.
Labor’s dismissal of One Nation has included that it is not a serious party of government.
And yet in waving away any fallout from its broken promises without even blinking, Albanese’s Labor has demonstrated it has placed its naked pursuit of power above principle, honesty and accountability.
But it should remember trust is a hard-earned. It is easily lost. And that moment arrived on Tuesday when Dr Chalmers rose in the House of Representatives to deliver his Budget speech.
So blatant is the breach of trust that it is impossible to see how this Government can ever win it back.
Why would we trust the Albanese Government to stick to its word ever again?
