By framing the Budget around intergenerational fairness, or whatever weak excuse the Treasurer gave for raiding private equity, it seems Labor was trying to appeal to young voters.

They have to do this.

While the Coalition have an aging problem, Labor have a greening problem.

The old party faithful from the glory days of the two-party system are dying out. Meanwhile, retired Labor voters have been sacrificed in the intergenerational tax grab, painted with the same brush of privilege used against older conservatives. Working-class voters between the ages of 35-55 have become incredibly politically malleable thanks to aggressive Woke politics, anti-Australian, anti-family, anti-merit, and anti-Christian sentiment. They want homes, yes, but they’re also looking at their power bill thinking where the f- is this cheap energy? Tradies are fed up working their asses off only to watch Labor pay off their peers’ HECS debt or lavish cash and special benefits on migrants with money knocked off their pay. By the time Labor is finished, these Labor voters will be wearing MAGA hats.

Who’s left? (Literally and figuratively.)

Twenty-five and under remain one of the only age brackets that haven’t experienced socialist tax creep.

And there are plenty of problems for Labor on this front.

Labor has to navigate the consequences of identity politics. The Greens have been making inroads into the next generation thanks to a decade of climate politics, race entitlement, aggressive LGBTQ+ agendas, and the death of critical thinking which has been embedded in the education system. From preschool to university, Australians are being forged into eco-radicals while doomscrolling has destroyed attention spans. How do you transcribe complex economic theory into a five-second attention span?

Even if the only issue was a pseudo-religious devotion to the climate agenda, Vote Green or the world will END is something that takes time to deconvert from. It’s like being raised a Christian and expecting the threat of hellfire to vanish when a diploma is handed over. Spiritual emotions and saviour narratives don’t work like that. Especially not when government institutions and corporate environments reinforce the belief system like a weekly church service.

Significant effort has been put into blurring the line between religion and politics and the results are showing up at the ballot box. Some might call this election interference on a generational scale. Others call it the greater good with shades of Orwell.

And the communist-leaning Greens are the immediate beneficiaries with the Teals soaking up a few of the misguided conservative children whose parents are too rich to consider Mao’s Anglo cousin.

It’s not exactly what Labor thought would happen. While the Greens were useful as a small agitating mob in Canberra, pushing the Overton window toward gangrenous Big Government ideas so Labor could pretend to be centrist – a collectivist movement with actual power and a conjoined pro-Palestine and Indigenous activist base has become destructive to any attempt at maintaining sensible government. This tension has bubbled over in many Greens press releases where both the old and new leadership have been testing their electoral power against Labor (thankfully, with little success).

(On its own, the breed of environmental collectivism pushed by the Greens does not appear capable of pushing beyond a 10 per cent ceiling. They are infinitely more powerful with the pro-Palestine / Islamic movement attached which allows them to pick up vast sections of migrant-dominated city seats. This is what the Green Party did in the UK, exchanging environmental principles for foreign-based activism. True Green Party members and leaders are now being replaced by Islamic community leaders. There is a lesson there for the Greens if they care to preserve their environmental movement, but it will depend on what interests them more: the planet, or Parliament.)

Having the Greens siphon up the radical youth vote and push it straight into Labor via preferences historically allowed Labor to keep a clean election campaign that didn’t scare older voters. The Greens won over the radical uni students and gifted them to Labor. Great deal. Now, the Greens are winning seats Labor wanted.

No doubt some Labor policy advisor has sat themselves down and tried to war game the Green situation.

How do you appeal to a broad range of niche, cultish activist clans on the fringe of religious and communist philosophy? How do you apply working-class union values to jobless graduates who believe work is literally slavery or small cultural enclaves who accumulate wealth in tight family structures, often drawn from some form of public welfare? Well, someone probably said, they all want to eat the rich. We can work with that!

You would be amazed how many people still believe that public wealth is infinite and a paycheque cut from the public service represents wealth creation, rather than wealth depletion.

A wealthy private sector delivers a wealthy nation. Those businesses are constantly making the pile of money available to the economy larger. It is the only way to deliver tax cuts while increasing productivity and paying off the debt.

But a wealthy public sector creates a poverty-stricken nation. This is doubly true if a section of the economy is constantly sending money overseas to relatives or if the government is handing billions to foreign companies. Bringing millions of migrants into a shrinking pool of capital is how idiot governments create catastrophe. More mouths to feed, fewer dollars to go around, rising civil unrest, which in turn necessitates more government control. The safety people believe a public service job creates (because the government cannot go out of business), is misplaced. Government can (and does) go out of business. It’s called an economic crisis. And the people are the ones who have to find a way to bail them out, usually with stolen wealth, unpaid labour, and the dreams of their children.

None of this has stopped the Treasurer and Prime Minister cracking their knuckles and hurling taxes at every section of the private sector. They have a trillion-dollar debt and no intention of tightening their own belts or pulling back on foreign aid…

The Treasurer either forgot or did not know that so many of these young people already found a way to get ahead in an economic climate that hates them.

I’m not going to pretend to know anything about Bitcoin. Like many in my jaded and forgotten generation, I’m paranoid and suspicious of digital schemes. Heck, I won’t even use Uber after a solid decade of don’t get into strangers’ cars and don’t meet randoms off the internet. The idea of ordering a stranger off the internet to drive me around seems like a betrayal or my parental programing.

However, Bitcoin and crypto are absolutely, unfathomably huge among young Australians.

Already popular among the left, it was entrenched as a cool enterprise by the rise of Trump on the right. There are reports that say 53 per cent of young Australians have crypto investments. And Chalmers dramatically increased their tax burden. The Prime Minister likes to talk about being world leaders, well, Australia is a world leader in crypto investment. It is extremely difficult to find out what the total holding of Australian crypto investors is or how much tax this might represent. But it’s a lot.

So, either the Treasurer knew this and he was hoping for a massive injection of cash into the Budget, or he thought it was negligible and unlikely to upset the young vote.

Either way, dangling homeownership over these people only exaggerates their rage at tax hikes.

After all, it’s not clear how the government thinks these young people can simply line up at an auction once houses are thrown onto the market. They have to borrow vast sums of money in an environment where inflation is surging, interest rates are rising, businesses are collapsing, and the government is taking more of their paycheque. Even with the dicey 5 per cent deposit scheme, most of these Australians would rather keep hedging their bets on crypto for a bit longer.

They are furious with the Treasurer, and they are likely to express that at the next election.

Donald Trump, with the sage advice of his youngest son, would be all over this talking point. Let’s hope the conservatives can find a few young advisors to capitalise on this serious Budget error.

Flat White is written by Alexandra Marshall. If you would like to support her work, shout her a coffee over at donor-box.

Also, thank you to all the lovely comments I have been receiving privately. It is a pleasure to write for you.