CAMERON MILNER: Federal Budget has destroyed Jim Chalmers’ chance to ever be prime minister

Jim Chalmers may have just destroyed his chance to ever be prime minister.

He’s been handed a chalice full of political poison and made to drink every last drop, in full public view.

Sure, it was wrapped in excuses of intergenerational equity as the right decisions for the right reasons. But whatever the spin, this Budget was outright lying to voters from start to finish.

Gutless Anthony Albanese wanted to win by deceit and to deliver Bill Shorten’s tax reforms from the safety of a huge majority and against an emasculated opposition.

No one can dispute the need for Shorten’s suite of tax changes, but how they’ve been imposed by Chalmers and Albanese comes at a drastic transactional cost.

That cost is that the Prime Minister is now a liar.

This could see Chalmers’ credibility forever shot to pieces as an accomplice in Albanese’s great fraud.

The irony of Albanese’s broken promises are they a carbon copy of Shorten’s policies. Imitation truly is the sincerest form of flattery.

It’s not lost on anyone that Albanese’s ascension to Labor leader was helped by having two toadie mate — former SA premier Jay Weatherill and Gillard-era trade minister Craig Emerson — do a Pam Bondi and write a review that condemned the Shorten tax reforms as too much big policy ambition.

They were willing helpers in the small target strategy that saw Albanese elected, and then dither across his first term.

It was a rinse and repeat exercise a year ago. The strategy of delivering little and promising to do even less in the next term gave him an even bigger majority with which to get nothing done.

Albanese’s term in office can now be forever summed up as the era of “small target, big lies”.

No wonder voters are marching across the floor to One Nation.

Trust in politics was hanging by a thread even before Albanese wanted to win based on a lie.

A lie told to hard working voters who every three years get to vote for a government based on what they say they’ll do — and just as importantly, what they say they won’t.

Peter Dutton promised nuclear power stations and thanks to Angus Taylor, higher taxes and more debt and rightly lost.

Albanese’s win was based on a no surprises, steady, stodgy and predictable mediocrity.

Now, he is saying things are so, so different from just a year ago. Yeah sure.

Albanese is so desperate to claim credit for Shorten’s ideas that he briefed out to friendly news outlets that he’d tasked Chalmers and Katy Gallagher before last Christmas to look at the same tax reforms.

That’s a long way before the war on Iran and further exposes as a lie Chalmers’ Budget night justification of the broken promises which put blame on the conflict and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz.

They were out spinning that the decision to back the Shorten reforms was only three weeks old, but Albanese’s desperation to be written anywhere into a Labor history has put a further lie to this version of events.

The PM was infamously asked in the closing days of the Federal election to guarantee these changes would not occur.

“Yes, how hard is it…for the fiftieth time,” he sneered.

Voters now know under Albanese, the lying is easy.

Voters don’t expect politicians to tell the truth, but on the Richter scale of broken promises this an 11. A political earthquake just as the fault lines are more pronounced than ever before.

It comes as One Nation cracks the public consciousness for its clarity of purpose and straight-talking style.

There is little doubt that Labor remains in the box seat for the next election; even the one that should be held within weeks to give Labor a chance for voters to pass judgment on this Budget.

It’s been a very well worn path for leaders to put major reforms before the voters, to get a mandate to govern.

Kevin Rudd did it. John Howard did and so did Shorten.

Both Gough Whitlam in 1974 and Bob Hawke in 1984 did it, both calling double dissolution elections to force a Budget-related mandate mid term.

Chalmers instead looks to be doing a Joe Hockey. The poisonous 2014 “austerity” Budget that broke promises left Hockey’s ambitions to be PM dead, buried and cremated.

Albanese will claim the next election victory as forgiveness from voters for his lies, an electoral absolution for breaking his word and making his bond worthless.

So, who will pay the ultimate price for this betrayal of voter trust?

It most likely won’t be Albanese. Instead a delayed justice will be exacted on his Treasurer’s ambition to succeed him.

Chalmers was trying to be a great Labor reformer, even as at every opportunity Albanese would chop his legs out from under him.

Now, Chalmers shares the ignominy of being joined at the hip to Albanese’s lies.

Voters might even forgive Albanese in time, but they won’t forget Chalmers delivering the Budget of broken promises.

And as Chalmers knows, the ambitious within his own caucus won’t either.

Health Minister Mark Butler has clean hands with his NDIS changes as do Housing Minister Clare O’Neil and rising star Andrew Charlton, who collectively make up Labor’s next generation.

Shorten’s tax reforms are absolutely the right reforms. But the right plan would be to take it to voters, instead of hiding behind a huge majority and a feckless Opposition.

Albanese did the lying, but it may well be Chalmers who pays the ultimate price by never getting to be PM.

Cameron Milner is a former Queensland Labor State secretary