It has taken me a little while to properly digest both the Federal Budget and the increasingly hysterical conversation surrounding it.
Because once you cut through the slogans, outrage and social media theatrics, much of the reaction from the Coalition, One Nation and sections of the conservative media has bordered on the ridiculous.
Every Federal Budget now seems to follow the same predictable script: before Australians have even had time to read the detail, the outrage machine fires into life and the political hysteria begins.
And Treasurer Jim Chalmers’s latest Federal Budget has exposed that reality more clearly than ever.
Before most Australians had even read the Budget papers, the Coalition, Pauline Hanson, sections of the business lobby and large parts of the conservative media had already declared economic Armageddon. Apparently modest tax reform, housing measures and attempts to rebalance parts of the economy now amount to “socialism”, “class warfare” and an “attack on aspiration”.
Honestly, if you listened only to commercial talkback radio or Sky After Dark, you would think Labor had announced the forced collectivisation of suburban investment properties.
And right on cue, New England MP Barnaby Joyce joined the outrage parade, declaring the Budget a “class war budget” supposedly targeting aspiration and entrepreneurship.
This from a politician who has spent decades representing one of the poorest electorates in New South Wales while regional housing affordability, infrastructure bottlenecks and workforce shortages have steadily worsened around him.
Barnaby Joyce talks endlessly about aspiration. But after all these years in Canberra, many young people across New England are still asking a very reasonable question: aspiration for who exactly?
Because right now plenty of regional Australians are aspiring simply to find a rental property, see a GP, access childcare or stay in the towns they grew up in.
Instead, what this Budget actually attempts to do is confront a reality many conservatives simply do not want to admit: the economic settings Australia has operated under for decades are no longer working for millions of people.
Young Australians are increasingly locked out of housing. Rents are crushing households. Productivity growth is weak. Infrastructure has failed to keep pace with population growth. And too many people now believe the only path to financial security is accumulating assets rather than building, innovating or working productively.
That did not happen because of one Budget. And it certainly did not happen because of Labor.
It happened after years of governments — particularly Coalition governments — treating housing primarily as a speculative asset class while convincing Australians this was somehow normal economic management.
Yet now that Labor is cautiously trying to recalibrate some of those settings, the outrage machine has gone into overdrive.
And lost underneath all the screaming is the fact that the Budget actually contains measures aimed at easing pressure on ordinary Australians: cost-of-living relief, cheaper medicines, housing initiatives, investment in skills and training, and attempts to improve long-term housing supply rather than simply inflating property prices further.
None of those measures are revolutionary. None magically solve decades of policy failure overnight. They are clearly not enough. But it is a start. And they are at least directed towards the real pressures many Australians are facing, instead of simply feeding grievance politics and culture war outrage.
One of the most dishonest claims being pushed is that changes to negative gearing and capital gains tax concessions somehow “destroy aspiration”.
That framing is absurd.
Aspiration is not an investor owning their fourth negatively geared property while a teacher or nurse cannot buy their first home. Aspiration is secure housing. Aspiration is believing hard work still matters. Aspiration is a younger generation having confidence that the economic system might actually work for them too.
But conservative politics in Australia increasingly cannot discuss economic reform honestly because too much of its modern identity now revolves around grievance. Opposition for opposition’s sake has replaced serious policy thinking. If Labor proposes reform, conservatives instinctively declare catastrophe whether the argument stacks up or not.
And nowhere was that clearer than the hilarious intervention this week from a group calling themselves “40 Young Australian Entrepreneurs Against the Budget”.
In what may genuinely become one of the great unintentional self-owns of modern political discourse, these self-described startup visionaries posted memes declaring the government a “47% partner” in their businesses because they might eventually pay more tax.
The level of intellectual maturity on display was about what you would expect from people who believe political memes are a substitute for serious economic analysis.
A friend of mine cut through the nonsense perfectly. He pointed out that taxpayers were already “partners” in those businesses long before they ever turned a profit.
Taxpayers funded the schools and universities that educated them. Taxpayers built the roads, telecommunications and digital infrastructure their businesses rely upon. Taxpayers fund the legal system that protects their intellectual property. Taxpayers maintain the political stability, courts, regulators and institutions that make Australia a low-risk place to invest and operate.
In other words, wealth creation does not happen in a vacuum. That is the part these sooky grievance merchants never want acknowledged.
Modern capitalism depends entirely on functioning public institutions. Markets do not magically float in space detached from government and society. Successful economies are ecosystems supported by collective investment over generations.
Yet somehow the moment governments ask highly profitable individuals or corporations to contribute fairly back into the system that enabled their success, parts of the tech-bro and free-market class suddenly start screaming about socialism.
It is performative nonsense — and beneath it sits a deeply selfish worldview that happily accepts the benefits of public investment, infrastructure and stability, but recoils in outrage the moment success requires giving something back to the society that made it possible.
And frankly, some of the reaction to this Budget has had a very adolescent quality to it — wealthy or aspiring wealthy Australians behaving as though modest reform is equivalent to economic persecution.
The hypocrisy becomes even more staggering when you look at the Coalition’s growing convergence with One Nation.
For years conservatives lectured Australians about “budget discipline”, “living within our means” and “economic responsibility”. Yet when Labor delivers targeted savings, restrained spending and structural reform, those same voices immediately pivot to panic campaigns about retirement, aspiration and wealth destruction.
Because modern Coalition politics increasingly has no serious economic framework beyond opposing whatever Labor proposes.
And that vacuum of ideas is exactly why sections of the Coalition now sound less like an alternative government and more like a polished extension of One Nation talking points.
And that should alarm regional Australians more than anyone.
Because One Nation’s entire political model is built on grievance without solutions. They identify real frustrations — housing stress, cost-of-living pressure, stretched services, insecure work — and then redirect that anger toward migrants, minorities, universities, cities or “elites” while offering almost no serious structural economic policy themselves.
They talk endlessly about standing up for ordinary Australians yet routinely oppose or undermine reforms that would materially improve the lives of workers, renters, students and low-income families.
Their economic philosophy rarely extends beyond slogans, culture wars and resentment politics.
And perhaps most cynically of all, One Nation has spent years convincing struggling Australians that the reason they cannot get ahead is the nurse who migrated from India, the international student working casually at a supermarket, or the refugee family trying to build a life here — rather than decades of policy failure, stagnant wages, housing speculation and governments unwilling to properly plan for growth.
It is the oldest trick in politics: keep people angry at each other so they do not start asking harder questions about the systems actually failing them — or realise that much of the outrage is coming from people with no workable policies themselves.
The uncomfortable truth for the Coalition is that the closer they drift toward One Nation-style grievance politics, the less serious they appear as an alternative government.
Every time senior conservatives start talking about migration, welfare or taxation lately, it feels less like economic leadership and more like someone skim-read a One Nation focus group script moments before the cameras arrived.
And nowhere is that drift more obvious than with Barnaby Joyce himself. Increasingly, his contribution to national debate seems to consist almost entirely of permanent outrage, slogans, performative conflict and a bizarre fixation on renewable energy, while the structural problems facing regional Australia continue unresolved.
Meanwhile the conservative media has abandoned any real pretence of balanced economic analysis altogether.
Too much political commentary now functions as outrage entertainment rather than journalism. Complex policy gets reduced to hysterical clickbait because fear drives ratings and anger drives engagement.
And the result is a political culture where myths spread faster than facts.
Australians are told tax reform is communism. Housing reform is tyranny. And any attempt to question decades of speculative excess is somehow an attack on freedom itself.
And perhaps nothing captures the dishonesty of modern scare campaigns better than the ridiculous “death tax” hysteria now circulating through parts of conservative politics and social media. Here are the actual facts.
- Inheritance is not being taxed.
- Estates are not being taxed.
- Farms remain exempt.
- Small business capital gains concessions remain untouched.
- Existing testamentary trusts are grandfathered.
The actual change is far narrower: newly created discretionary testamentary trusts from May 2026 onwards will face a minimum 30 per cent tax rate on distributed income from 2028.
In other words, this is not about stopping families passing on farms, homes or businesses to their children. It is about limiting aggressive income-splitting arrangements that allow some wealthy families to pay lower effective tax rates than ordinary wage earners.
A nurse earning $80,000 already pays roughly that rate on their top income bracket. Yet parts of the Right immediately screamed “death tax” because fear campaigns are easier than honest conversations about tax fairness.
They are not defending battlers. They are defending loopholes.
It would almost be funny if the consequences were not so serious. Because while the outrage machine screams itself hoarse every night, the real challenges facing Australia remain enormous.
Housing affordability remains dire. Infrastructure bottlenecks remain severe. Intergenerational inequality continues growing. And younger Australians are increasingly losing faith that the economic contract which benefited previous generations still exists for them at all.
Reasonable people can debate the detail of any Budget. That is healthy. But what Australia desperately needs less of is performative hysteria and, frankly, bullshit from people whose entire political and commercial model depends on keeping Australians permanently angry, fearful and divided.
Because at some point this country has to decide whether economic policy should serve the future — or simply preserve the comfort of those who already own most of it.
Denise McHugh is an experienced educator in Tamworth. She is Chair of the NSW ALP Education and Skills Committee and Deputy President of the Independent Education Union (IEU).
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