With a budget designed to stir up the young against Albanese’s kulaks – older Australians – while frightening off investors and shovelling billions off to Beijing, Australians are realising we’re living under the most extreme left-wing government the nation has ever known. Continuing its electorally oriented antisemitism, the government’s sordid role in the return of the ‘brides of Isis’ – and its blatant lies to cover this up – was both deceitful and disgraceful.

This budget is so unpopular that so far, two Labor premiers have broken ranks.

Now, like some deranged antipodean V.I. Lenin with a ‘two steps forward, one step back’ New Economic Policy, Mr Albanese is furiously back-pedalling.

Simultaneously with ramming the budget through, teams of  apparatchiks are preparing legislation for a panicked retreat, all part of Mr Albanese’s plan – if you can call it that – to wreck the free-market economy and anyone associated with it. Does he realise this includes once Labor-voting ‘tradies’ as well as his cabinet, one of whom owns six houses?

Meanwhile, OECD data confirms that under this government, Australia has experienced a larger decline in real per capita household disposable income than any advanced economy since mid-2022, plummeting by roughly eight per cent from its peak. While the national debt is massive – with off-budget and other devices, the hidden cost of renewables and also state debts, more around $4 trillion than the admitted $1 trillion – reckless government spending has delivered the highest inflation and the most severe collapse in living standards in the developed world. This isn’t simply accidental economic mismanagement. Rather, it is the predictable outcome of a hard-left ideology that strangles business and relies on the lazy sugar hit of mass migration to mask a hollowed-out economy.

A lifelong politician, Mr Albanese is a death-duties-addicted member and leader of Labor’s hard-left faction. As to his current centrist posture, a leaked audio reveals him reassuring the hard-left of his true loyalties with a future return to their ranks.

The government’s mismanagement extends to foreign policy, radicalised as far as Labor dares to go. Who can forget a minister demanding caucus support for some anti-Israel foreign policy change: ‘How can I possibly defend that policy from the steps of the Lakemba Mosque?’

While realists admit Labor’s trillion-dollar climate policy won’t change the temperature in the slightest, the money enriches assorted climate cronies, especially in Beijing. The special 50-per-cent capital gains tax discount for investors in renewables guarantees even billions more will be go to Beijing for the junk that uselessly poisons our farms.

This budget is a turning point: Australians everywhere have woken up to Labor.

Meanwhile, Stage 1 of Albanese’s long-term dream to take a swathe out of every deceased estate has been launched. Next, it is sure to be the family home. Labor is actually talking about it in New South Wales, despite it being so unpopular last time they had to repeal it before an election.

Mr Albanese denies these measures are on the agenda. But most people now think a denial  is Albanese shorthand for ‘It’s coming soon’.

The record of another hard-left government which Mr Albanese clearly admires, that of communist China, tells us a lot. After they brought on the death of at least 60 million and a wrecked economy, they decided in order to survive to allow a controlled form of market economy.

While it is impossible to know what Beijing’s communists truly believe in, we know exactly what they detest. When the peaceful Falun Gong grew too popular, the communists decided to brutally, yet profitably, persecute them – kidnapping healthy practitioners and ripping out their organs from their living bodies for the lucrative black market, a macabre practice now extended to China’s Muslim Uighurs. Yet there is not a single word of protest about this from our hard-left or their radical Islamist allies.

It is important to note what the Falun Gong actually believe in, summed up in their guiding slogan: Truth, Compassion, and Forbearance. In the authoritarian world – increasingly dominated by the Beijing-Moscow-Pyongyang-Tehran Axis of Evil – these three tenets are utterly rejected. We may therefore conclude that among the defining characteristics of hard-left authoritarianism is a violent abhorrence of those same virtues.

Testing respect for these virtues could well tell us much about those of the hard left even when they say they’ve seen the light and are now centrist.

When we apply this litmus test to Mr Albanese, what do we find?

Consider Truth. A disturbing feature of the Labor party, highlighted as far back as 2004 by Labor eminence Barry Cohen, has been its ongoing tolerance of antisemitism. More broadly, Mr Albanese has demonstrated a casual relationship with the truth, most glaringly when he betrayed the electorate on property taxation. After promising over 50 times that he would not touch capital gains tax or negative gearing, the mask has slipped, directly threatening the financial security of aspirational Australians and their family homes.

Then consider Compassion. The government has demonstrated absolutely none for the elderly, trying with their Marxist ‘intergenerational equity’ slogan to sow division, turn young against old, and have the youth blame old Australians for the Albanese government-created housing crisis. Purely out of spite for them daring to be self-funded, Labor is stripping away the private health insurance rebate, loading couples with up to $1,600 a year and forcing more than 60,000 self-funded retirees to abandon or downgrade their private health insurance. The government’s vicious, spiteful act will save not a cent. Instead, it will increase the number of people dependent on Medicare, vastly increasing  the Albanese government’s already catastrophic queues for the public health system and jamming surgical waiting lists.

Finally, consider Forbearance – the political restraint and tolerance of opposing views essential to a healthy democracy. This government has repeatedly shown it possesses none. Whether it was the arrogant, my-way-or-the-highway approach that doomed the Voice referendum by refusing to entertain compromise, or the relentless guillotining of debate in parliament to ram through radical, union-dictated industrial relations laws without proper scrutiny, the Albanese government is entirely intolerant of dissent.

While trying to put Australians into a state of dependency and control, the hard left continues to shovel billions to Beijing. What better recipe could there be to turn us into the Argentina of the South Seas?