CAMERON MILNER: First we had Voice, now get ready for Albanese’s big new wealth tax

On election night 2022, Anthony Albanese sprung Voice, truth and treaty on Australian voters having never canvassed it during the campaign proper.

Just imagine what crazy, mandate-less idea he has mind for his victory speech on May 3.

My short priced favourite is a new broad based wealth tax — Albo’s wealth tax will be his Voice 2.0.

The architecture is already completely in place through his stalled tax on unrealised capital gains. Just removing its current application to superannuation and making it on all assets would be so simple.

Albanese’s Uluru Statement from the Heart brain fart in 2022 ended in an unmitigated disaster for First Nations people and the cause of reconciliation.

The Prime Minister moved on from all of this with his now all too familiar moral amnesia.

A win this time, though, will see Albanese think he’s a political genius. I can already see him sobbing while saying “I’ve been underestimated my whole life”.

But Albo unplugged is getting ready to tell voters, after polls have closed, just what they can actually expect from him over the next three years.

He’s a master at saying what he thinks voters want to hear before polling day and then doing the complete opposite when in Government.

There was the $275 off your power bill, promised and never delivered.

Fighting the cost of living saw him go surrender monkey months later in Labor’s first Budget.

We’ve had upgrade Albo, mile high Albo and freebie Albo, just never delivery Albo.

He’s embraced corporate largesse with the enthusiasm usually only seen by a sub-Saharan despot on his first visit to Beijing.

Albanese has been living large and a win next week will be vindication and a leave pass to be even more excessively self-centred in his second term.

The Albanistas will party hard at the Kingston Cantina thinking what they didn’t do for Labor voters in their first term is now a blueprint for doing even less in their second.

See, Albo likes very much not having a long to-do list. He’s a performer, not a reformer.

Happy to spin someone else’s records as DJ Albo rather than have the vision or courage to make one of his own.

The great tragedy for Australia is that the hard reforms will wait another term just as our balance sheet as a nation is in even greater disrepair.

The Liberals, though, have outdone themselves in this campaign. While Albo played small target in 2022, the Liberals are no target even at point blank range in 2025.

Albanese hasn’t won this election as much as the Liberals have handed it to him on a silver platter.

Some Liberals are about to brace for impact come Saturday May 3, while many of the campaign team and front bench will have spent the full 35 days of the campaign already bent over grabbing their ankles.

Albanese will be insufferable come Sunday, his proverbial eating grin will be just nauseating. And then in some Groundhog Day-style moment the past three years will flash before our collective eyes and Smug Albo will just go back to being weak and self-serving again.

But Albo will have learnt from the Voice experience.

Why bother asking punters to have their say when you can simply use Parliament with the support of the extreme Greens in the Senate to ram through your wealth tax agenda?

Albanese might well eat their dinners, take their free tickets but deep down he’s a houso kid, raised in the hard left of the Labor Party who resents those with ambition, and entrepreneurial spirit. He’s happy to accept their gifts, but really he’s jealous of their wealth and success.

The politics of envy runs deep.

He’s tried to emulate them with the clifftop mansion purchase, but deep down he knows he’s not in their league when it comes to money and he knows they snigger behind his jelly back.

What better way to really stick it to them than to introduce a broad-based wealth tax?

It will be a supercharged re-introduction of the old death duty paid for by the living every year of their lives.

Albanese has already shown his hand and his long held envy of success is well known across the Labor Party.

Election night promises another moment of unbridled mandate-claiming bizarreness from the bloke who made the Voice the centrepiece of his first term.

Only by asking voters at a referendum was it stopped.

Albo won’t be making that same mistake again and will instead use the bully pulpit of Parliament from which to deliver his next reign of error.

Voters get the government they vote for — it’s the cornerstone of our democracy. Governments used to fear losing after failing to deliver as badly as Albanese has, but by the looks that’s all about to change on May 3.

The Liberals deserve to lose because of the campaign they haven’t run just as much as Labor deserved to lose after failing to be a Labor government over the past term.

For voters it’s a Hobson’s choice.

For Albo it’s a free get out of jail card.

Voters still have it within their power to have their say between now and Saturday May 3.

Come that Saturday night, though, and an Albanese win, voters, just like in 2022 will be told what Albanese really wants to do in the full knowledge that it wasn’t disclosed during the campaign.

And Albo can’t wait for those polls to close so he can announce an agenda no one was asked to vote for — Albo’s new wealth tax, his updated version of the Voice to Parliament.