Government will need to tread carefully through budget storm

May 23, 2026 — 5:00am

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“The truth of social media and attention,” entrepreneur Frank Greeff told the ABC this week, “is like, unfortunately, the more nuance you have, the quicker someone will scroll past and not really care about what you’re saying.”

Greeff, who founded a real estate marketing platform, made this comment while discussing the virality of his meme campaign targeting Labor’s tax changes in the federal budget. At the same time, he defined more than a political battleground – there is a warning in his words for how we debate issues in this country.

Since Labor was returned to office in a landslide last May, its supporters and external observers have urged it to take bold, reforming action. After what our chief political commentator James Massola called “four years of cautious incrementalism”, this year’s budget upped the ante.

When you change taxation, you change the nation, as Paul Keating might have said (but didn’t). And it is entirely predictable that you will generate a reaction.

Have Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Treasurer Jim Chalmers prepared for that reaction? It is a question that goes not only to basic political competence but to history. Neither man is likely to have forgotten how the debate over the resource super profits tax in 2010 ended for........

© Brisbane Times