‘My word is my bond,’ said a freshly minted Prime Minister Albanese in July 2022. After this week’s budget, his word is a junk bond, as worthless as the paper it is printed on. Pumped up with the hubris that comes from holding 94 seats in the House of Representatives, more than double his opponents, Treasurer Jim Chalmers has recklessly decided to implement the tax agenda voters rejected when Bill Shorten took it to the 2016 and 2019 elections.

Not surprisingly, Labor MPs looked worried as they listened to Chalmers’ tax hikes. Less than two years ago, Labour won in a landslide in the UK. Last Thursday, they faced Starmergeddon, with Labour’s share of the national vote estimated at only 15 per cent.

After the Farrer by-election, everyone is aware of the potency of the populist vote. Pundits have focused on the humiliation the Coalition suffered but Labor has only to look to the UK to see the havoc Reform has wreaked on its comrades in the old country.

After the rout in her old seat, Ley took a swing at her successor, Angus Taylor, saying, ‘On the day the leadership spilled in February, the new leader said the Liberal party needed to “change or die”. Three months later, the result in Farrer demonstrates that statement to be far truer today than it ever was then.’

What the result in Farrer actually demonstrates is that percentages are not Ley’s forte. The Coalition won only 22 per cent of the vote in Farrer, but this is an improvement on the dismal 18 per cent to which it sank under Ley, whose personal approval sat on 23 per cent, whereas Taylor sits on 34 per cent.

Ley owes the Liberal party a lot. Over twenty-five years, it gave her ministerial portfolios, the deputy leadership, and the leadership. As deputy leader, she presided over a plunge in party support not just federally but in her own electorate. Then, after the catastrophic May 2025 federal election, she accepted the support of the green-left wing of the party to become leader, a decision at odds with the conservative voters in her electorate who were once again treated as if they had nowhere to go. But when Ley forced a by-election on the people who had supported her 12 months earlier, they showed that they did have somewhere else to go and marched straight into the arms of David Farley and One Nation.

If Ley had held on for a week longer, Taylor’s first test would have been his reply to the federal budget. That could only have helped the result in Farrer. But Ley resigned at the best time for her defined benefit superannuation, not for her party. It wasn’t pretty, but it happens. Few remember that when Bob Hawke resigned, the safe Labor seat of Wills fell to an independent. Nonetheless, the triumph of One Nation to which Ley contributed is much more significant than the fleeting parliamentary term of Phil Cleary, who replaced Hawke.

Yet for all the obstacles the green-left Liberals have thrown in Taylor’s way, he has just got lucky. Albanese’s broken promises on housing are as big a mistake as his dangerously divisive, arrogant and wasteful Voice to parliament. Albanese will discover, as former prime minister Julia Gillard did, how unforgiving voters are when promises on taxes are broken.

Chalmers is delusional to imagine he can raise the tax on capital gains from investment properties and get rid of negative gearing on all but new-build rentals without being punished at the polls. Rental investments are almost the only way that millions of Australians on modest incomes have been able to inflation-proof and, to some extent, tax-proof their savings and build bricks-and-mortar financial security with an income-generating asset. They will not be kind to a spendthrift government that punishes their prudence and robs them of aspiration.

Albanese has also torpedoed One Nation’s most devastating critique of the Coalition, that it is just the Uniparty, indistinguishable from Labor. Thanks to Albanese, Chalmers, Burke and Bowen, the differentiation grows more stark by the day.

Taylor’s budget-in-reply speech will repudiate not just Labor’s broken promises on housing but its reckless spending, driving up debt, inflation, and interest rates.

Labor’s pusillanimity in pandering to the Muslim vote is another gift to Taylor. Burke should be punished relentlessly for refusing to issue temporary exclusion orders to keep Isis supporters and alleged slave traders out of Australia.

As for immigration, the Coalition needs to reclaim its historic victory in stopping the boats while Labor ushered in 50,000 unauthorised arrivals. Since May 2022, Labor has brought in more than 1.3 million people, the largest surge in net overseas migration in Australian history. Taylor will dramatically cut those numbers and rigorously vet applicants to ensure that we do not accept people who reject Australian values.

Yes, the antics of green-left Liberals were as ruinous as those of Labor, but Taylor and Canavan have renounced net zero and will prioritise energy security and affordability, making it easier to dig and drill for coal, gas and minerals, and to generate power as cheaply as possible.

This will set up the Coalition, from today, to fight the next election on its strongest suits: terrorism and national security (Here come the Isis brides and Gazans on tourist visas), energy security (drill baby drill versus fuel shortages), economic aspiration (taking taxes off investment and saving) and turbo-charging economic growth, productivity and prosperity (death to the blue-banded bee, down with green hydrogen, dig, baby, dig).

Many on the left, including Malcolm the Miserable, are scathing about the Coalition doing deals with One Nation ‘bigots’. These are people who can’t distinguish between race and radical Islam, or a bearded man in a dress and a woman. In reality, One Nation isn’t racist; it is a refuge for the right wing of the Coalition.

In 1944, Robert Menzies went to Albury to unite the non-Labor forces into a single political movement capable of governing Australia. Eighty years later, Albury has delivered a brutal warning of the dangers of disunity. Taylor, like Menzies, has been attacked and written off by factional enemies and political opponents alike. But like Menzies, he needs to prove his critics wrong, unite the right to defeat Labor, and make Australia the land of the fair go again.