With this federal budget, Australia's last baby boomer PM becomes King of the Kids

In all likelihood, Anthony Norman Albanese will be this country's last baby boomer prime minister.

But he has now officially donned the cape of Youth Warrior, addressing himself to the unwinding of policies that for decades have plumped his own generation's asset sheets with tidy two-bedders, sure-fire flippers and solid family homes (close all facs, public transport).

This moment has been coming for some time, as home ownership rates ebbed among the young and swelled among the old, and as the massed ranks of millennials and gen Zs eligible to vote gradually approached and then outnumbered baby boomers.

The prime minister was born into exceedingly modest circumstances, but like many in his cohort, he caught a few breaks over his lifetime.

He received a free university education and caught the Sydney real estate wave at the right time. Of the 226 present serving members of the parliament, he's one of a handful who've been around long enough to be on the "old" parliamentary super scheme, guaranteeing a handsome income for life.

And tonight he becomes the first serving prime minister in decades to take a hammer to the most sacred shibboleth in Australian domestic politics: the assumption that housing in Australia is not just a life essential fairly high on Maslow's hierarchy of needs, but also an investment opportunity that presents, to the shrewd operator, a lower-taxed path to wealth than the orthodox technique of having a job.

An 'ambitious' budget

The buzzword across the 2026 budget and the introductory speech delivered by the treasurer is "ambitious". And it is indeed an ambitious thing for a government to shut down tax breaks that have earned a great many people a great deal of wealth.

What's steeled the prime minister, apart from his impatient treasurer, is the growing sentiment among younger generations (who are also the voters with the most elections in their future) that they are getting the rubber end of the real estate plunger. That they are priced out of the real estate market, obliged to pay ludicrously high rents to landlords who, thanks to a heady admixture of advantageous tax settings and timing, are sometimes holding multiple properties.

The language of generational change is everywhere in this budget. Private health insurance concessions for the over 65s are to be whipper-snipped to the tune of $3 billion. A wholesale redraw of annual migration now explicitly prioritises "educated, higher-skilled and younger migrants", particularly those who are already studying or living in Australia.

Venture capital incentives are henceforth to favour "young, expanding firms". Twenty thousand small companies will be able to trouser refunds of fringe benefits and payroll tax, so long as they've been in operation for less than two years.

Tax breaks for electric vehicles, meanwhile, will be eased back gradually, because in the assessment of the budget's drafters, the electric vehicle industry is now "mature", and if there's a coda to this document, it's that if you're mature, you're probably ticking along OK.

'Prospective' property and investment tax breaks

The property and investment tax breaks aren't being turned off like a tap, of course. The changes are "prospective". New capital gains tax rules don't kick in until July next year. New tax arrangements for discretionary trusts come into effect a year after that — in July 2028 (by which time, presumably, if everything goes according to plan, Albanese will be riding toward election victory aboard a palanquin toted by young and muscular voters, while Angus Taylor or his replacement reedily vows to restore justice to tax minimisers, to an appreciative rattling of Zimmer frames).

Properties currently being negatively geared can still be negatively geared. This is thanks to the practice of "grandfathering" — a budgetary practice in which persons currently benefiting from a scheme are allowed to continue benefiting, in order to avoid mass panic and/or systems collapse.

"Grandfathering" is a term absolutely crying out for a rebranding, by the way. And not just because in the context of this "intergenerational justice" budget, it sounds a lot like making an exception for Grandpa and his 15 blocks of flats.

"Grandfathering" as a term dates back to the United States in the late 19th century, when various Southern states introduced new barriers to voter enrolment (literacy requirements, property requirements and so on). Voters whose grandfathers had been eligible to vote before the Civil War — and if you stop for a moment to consider what colour skin such citizens would universally have, the gambit becomes clear — were exempted from the new rules. So yeah, "grandfathering" does have rather an unfortunate historical connotation of the joke continuing, to some degree, to be on the disadvantaged.

Will Australians cop giving up sweet tax breaks for fairness?

But the biggest post-budget challenge facing Albanese: King of the Kids™ isn't going to be about the etymology of "grandfathering".

Albanese now faces the knottiest advocacy task of all: Convincing voters to accept a short- and mid-term hardship (the forfeiture of sweet tax breaks) in the interests of long-term fairness and prosperity.

The task is made more difficult by the fact that the Australian population is already deeply cheesed off. And by the fact that he literally just promised one year ago that he would absolutely not do the thing he's just done. AND by the fact that even the youthful beneficiaries of this ambitious redesign are not sitting quietly around radiograms, ears pricked for the good news of how the old guy in the Billy Bragg T-shirt has just taken up the cudgels on their behalf. Which is why we must all prepare for the days ahead, which will be full of Tim Wilson TikToks depicting Albanese as a Boomer who's filled his beak with tax breaks and publicly funded super, and now is pulling up the drawbridge behind him, breaking not only his solemn promise but also the hopes and dreams of teenage investors everywhere.

This is a test of advocacy, of persuasion and — indeed — of ambition. Also, of political identity.

For the Liberal Party, the encouragement of home ownership is a bone-deep value.

When Robert Menzies gathered the disparate anti-Labor forces together at Albury 82 years ago, preparatory to forming the Liberal Party, his evocation of Australia's "Forgotten People" was already laced rhetorically around the family home, which he deemed "the foundation of sanity and sobriety … the indispensable condition of continuity; its health determines the health of society as a whole".

Over his prime ministership, Menzies initiated cash handouts to first home buyers. Built houses. Encouraged the sale of public housing stock to tenants. Home ownership rates soared from 53 per cent to 77 per cent.

But just days ago, Albury voted for One Nation. So, either the Liberal Party isn't saying the right things on this issue, or it's saying them in the wrong language, or to the wrong people.

Which is why this particular moment, in Australia's history as a federation, is so extraordinarily a) challenging and b) interesting.