Without Coalition chaos the Budget would not have been so bold

Mike Taylor

Managing Editor and Publisher

14 May 2026

ANALYSIS

The reality of Tuesday night’s Federal Budget with the changes to capital gains tax (CGT) and negative gearing is that the Albanese Government would not have dared be so bold if it did not have a stonking House of Representatives majority and a shambolic opposition.

Memories do not have to be very long to recall that former Federal Opposition leader, Bill Shorten, took a not dissimilar approach to CGT and capital gains to the 2019 Federal Election and delivered Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, his “I believe in miracles” win at the ballot box.

Morrison’s win had nothing to do with miracles and everything to do with inept strategy and communications on the part of the Australian Labor Party (ALP) and a highly effective scare campaign mounted by senior Coalition Government ministers and, indeed, members of the financial services industry.

The post-mortem conducted by the ALP in the wake of that election loss found as follows:

“Labor lost the election because of a weak strategy that could not adapt to the change in Liberal leadership, a cluttered policy agenda that looked risky and an unpopular leader. No one of these shortcomings was decisive but in combination they explain the result. Indeed, Bill Shorten led a united Party, saw off two Liberal prime ministers and won all three campaign debates.

Labor’s tax policies did not cost the Party the election. But the size and complexity of Labor’s spending announcements, totalling more than $100 billion, drove its tax policies and exposed Labor to a Coalition attack that fuelled anxieties among insecure, low-income couples in outer-urban and regional Australia that Labor would crash the economy and risk their jobs.”

So, with the need to deliver a Budget in the middle of a Parliamentary term whilst holding a stonking majority, the Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, judged that he could afford to allow his Treasurer, Jim Chalmers, to deliver the structural reforms which many would argue are long overdue.

Prime Minister Albanese has been accused of many things but, at base, he is a pragmatist and weighed that those most resistant to the structural changes delivered in the Budget were not going to vote for his party anyway.

He might also have considered that the Federal Opposition needs to balance its opposition to the Budget changes against the threat currently being posed by increasing electoral popularity of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party.

It says something about the Budget and the ALP that Bill Shorten said he felt “vindicated” by changes to negative gearing, capital gains tax and discretionary trusts.

While feeling vindicated, he might pause to consider the degree to which the ever-cautious Albanese has ensured the measures are relatively generously grandfathered thus minimising the scope for horror stories.