"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself", said Franklin D. Roosevelt during his presidential inauguration.

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FDR's reform message had been pitch-perfect to an electorate hungry for new ideas and betrayed by economic calamity. His 1933 New Deal promised to lift working-class Americans out of penury while expanding the purview of national government.

Nearly a century later, there is a new great depression, albeit unnamed. This one afflicts the body democratic though its roots draw on a persistent inequality.

Across the West, its currencies are fear and frustration - the dark matter of an asymmetric political universe, at once intangible yet endemic.

Among established political parties, these things manifest as furrowed brows and cautious tinkering when dramatic interventions are plainly required. Among voters, they show up as impatience, institutional desertion and party-political delamination. The centre cannot hold.

Nostalgic populism is an obvious beneficiary. But it is an illusion. By narrowing the mind and hardening the heart, it offers solace not solutions. It valorises an avowedly Australian strength but trades in injury and complaint. Its wellsprings owe more to retreat than any advance. Fear of change. Fear of the future. Fear of others.

Amid this penchant for demolition, there are other opportunities.

As Anthony Albanese and Jim Chalmers prepare their first budget of their second term, they face two quite different paths.

The orthodox response emphasises continuity and the avoidance of sudden moves. This means minor taxing and spending tweaks aimed primarily at short-term amelioration while leaving the main fiscal architecture in place.

Alternatively, they could read the deepening malady of Australia's spirit as not merely a problem to be minimised but rather a window to new thinking.

This version involves a clear-eyed assessment of the burgeoning failures in Australia's allocations of wealth and opportunity.

Rather than resisting the populist mood for disruption, Labor could seek to harness it by upturning tax and incentive boondoggles that sit mostly beyond the reach of the electoral majority - basically anyone under 50.

Could an Australian "new deal" change the circumstances for those currently locked out of the Australian dream? Could it restore faith in the utility of broad-based institutional parties? Surely, it's worth consideration.

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In a telling byelection on Friday in the safe Labour seat of Gorton and Denton, Keir Starmer's candidate was thrashed by Reform UK (28.7 per cent) and the Greens' Hannah Spencer (40.7 per cent).

Take a moment to ponder this. In a non-preferential voting system, establishment Labour suffered a collapse of more than 25 per cent and lost out to two diametrically opposed disruptors, one on each flank. Spencer easily secured the seat with a 28 per cent swing to the Greens. The combined improvement to both right and left disruptors was over 43 per cent.

The lesson here is that voters want action. They favour rapid change, not glacial adjustments.

With its record 94 seats, the Albanese government has vast numerical dominance and accompanying political capital. But with inflation and interest rates again on the rise, it also carries an expectation to take decisive action.

Of course, questions abound. Can Albanese change gears? Does he have the will and imagination to tackle intergenerational inequality?

Would he stare down the fear-mongering tabloid instincts of media naysayers? On the other hand, can he afford not to, given the broader appetite for disruption?

Two months out from the budget, this is the kite-flying season when racy reform ideas can both dance and disappear.

Even so, the early signs are encouraging.

Dumping the 50 per cent capital gains tax concession on property sales and capping the number of properties to be negatively geared have been floated.

Even before the government has formalised a position, the opposition has pledged to fight any changes. Its refrain that housing affordability is a supply problem and that taxing something more, simply reduces its supply, doesn't stack up.

First, the CGT does not tax housing construction but the profit from the sale thereof. Second, if prospective buyers of a second or sixth home were to seek other investment opportunities, then the reduced competition would bring earlier hammer falls at auction.

This then, could put more homes within the reach of first home buyers and, as the independent MP for Wentworth, Allegra Spender, notes, it could happen faster than housing construction programs, worthy as they may be.

Spender argues that the transfer of a financial incentive from one class of buyers to another - let's say from boomers to first home buyers - does not reduce the incentive but merely rebalances it in favour of new entrants to the market.

A key factor in house-price inflation is the reliable prospect of capital growth upon disposal, an income stream currently subsidised by other taxpayers - including renters.

How is that fair? The Parliamentary Budget Office projected revenue forgone over the coming decade at close to a quarter of a trillion dollars.

In coming weeks, Labor will come under pressure to grandfather this and exclude that. This it should resist.

For the first time in living memory, fortune now favours the electorally brave.

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