It is said, naivety in grown-ups is often charming; but when coupled with vanity it is indistinguishable from stupidity. The latest federal budget is a testament to that. Understanding what makes the primary author of that budget tick is helpful in understanding its objectives.

Dr Jim Chalmers is a product of the socialist school of politics. Before entering parliament in 2013, he spent his entire career as a Labor political staffer or ministerial adviser. It seems his experiences in those roles played to his instincts.

This was evident when, fearing Tony Abbott would become prime minister, Dr Chalmers wrote Glory Daze, arguing Abbott’s determination to depart from Labor’s big-government, identity-politics agenda, towards a more open, less regulated society, risked a combination of hyper-partisanship and self-serving political incentives.

As an MP, Dr Chalmers’s position became more radical. In 2023, as Treasurer, in an essay echoing the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset of Capitalism, he referred to ‘humanising capital’ and advocated ‘the transformation of the welfare state into a managerial utopia with the government in collaboration with superannuation funds acting as benevolent resource allocators through which autocratic technocratic elites will manage all aspects of society’.

Clearly at heart, Dr Chalmers is a Leninist. Having attended Davos in January, he is determined that Australia should become a society where people’s private savings are quasi-nationalised and invested in government projects. As a dyed-in-the-wool globalist, Chalmers and his Labor colleagues believe Covid and climate change dictate that no institution or individual alone can address the economic, environmental, social and technological challenges of our complex, interdependent world. Hence the need to kowtow to United Nations agencies like the WHO and the IPCC.

Along with fellow Labor sycophants, Chalmers foolishly ignores the reality that the WHO failed the world in its pandemic responses and that the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change’s real charter is to use the Paris agreement to redistribute wealth from rich countries, like Australia, to ‘developing’ countries like China.

But pushing a globalist line allows Labor to assume more coercive powers while appearing virtuous. For example, this budget offers significant tax incentives for green investments while punishing other private investment through regressive taxes. It is consistent with a ‘government knows best’ spending and investment policy.

Unfortunately for Australians, Labor’s record on resource allocation is not good. Projects like the disastrous Snowy Hydro 2.0, the NBN and the National Disability Insurance Scheme are just a few examples.

As recently as 2024 the Albanese government approved the outlay of a further $468.5 million dollars over five years to get the NDIS ‘back on track’. Then in 2025 it promised another $175.4 million to ‘safeguard the NDIS’s integrity’. One year later and with an election behind it, Labor suddenly discovered the NDIS was financially unsustainable.

In desperation, and abandoning integrity safeguards, the government has cut the NDIS’s budget by $36.2 billion over the next four years. However, with more than 10,000 direct employees and 27,700 active suppliers who employ about 270,000 workers in twenty occupations, not to mention investors holding stranded assets, that promise will likely become yet another ‘changed position’.

This budget puts great store on ‘intergenerational fairness’ and the lack of housing affordability for the young. Labor’s victimhood strategy is well rehearsed and uses any opportunity to divide and rule through the politics of envy and social division. And although the budget claims to address the housing shortage, Treasury modelling finds the latest tax ‘reforms’ actually deliver 35,000 fewer dwellings compared to a no-tax-change policy. Moreover, net migration is adding more than 990,000 to the population over the next four financial years which seems to conflict with solving a serious housing shortage.

And, despite promises to bring transparency back to government, there are no budget ‘fairness’ warnings that young Australians will inherit their share of $1.25 trillion of debt, now growing faster than the economy, or the $40 billion annual interest bill which will ultimately go with it. Indeed, Labor cynically  presumes it will take lived experience before the young realise that victimhood is a useful emotional lever for governments but, not conducive to wealth creation, social mobility or personal freedoms.

Labor is also betting that by the time the young discover those they once trusted had hypocritically grandfathered tax benefits for personal gain, politically, it won’t matter. Sadly, future generations will learn that thanks to government tax and spend policies, for the first time in Australian history, they are facing lower living standards than their parents and grandparents.

Casting aside the spin, this budget is a calculated ideological humbug intended to mislead voters in the interest of further concentrating power. It even dishonestly inflates defence spending by including, previously excluded, pension and veterans’ welfare expenditures.

With the next election two years away, and the opposition in disarray, Prime Minister Albanese, Treasurer Jim Chalmers and their colleagues have decided to weaponise their massive parliamentary majority to achieve generational, structural, social and economic change.

Yet, Labor’s hubris may well be its undoing. The latest Newspoll found 47 per cent of voters -believe the budget will be bad for the economy, while a large sample, immediate post-budget, poll, conducted by Roy Morgan, found One Nation outpolled Labor on primary support. It appears Labor’s deception and lies are eroding trust. Voters seem attracted to One Nation’s consistent advocacy of traditional values and its authentic, non-elite image. According to Morgan, on a two-party preferred basis, One Nation now trails Labor just marginally.

To be fair to the opposition, the Morgan poll was taken before leader Angus Taylor delivered his budget reply speech. But Taylor and the Liberal party must face the reality that their once-celebrated ‘broad church’ includes too many devil-worshippers who  influence the Coalition’s ambiguous position on many issues.

Time will tell what voters really think in the one poll that counts – a general election. But One Nation’s rise is no aberration.