Anthony McDonald

I mean, just look at Australia, all right?

We had a budget commitment to spend $10 billion on fuel security, you know, storage, looking at refining capacity, all that sort of stuff.

That wasn't on the political agenda before 2020.

the bomb started going off in Iran, but we were happy to just limp along with what we had.

And now we've signed up for the next three to five years to spend 10 billion bucks on this stuff.

And if we're doing it, we got through this relatively unscathed compared to a lot of economies, thanks to the fact that we're a wealthier nation and our businesses and consumers can afford to pay a bit more for petrol, diesel and aviation fuel in the short term.

If we're doing this fuel security thing, you can imagine it rolling out across the entire world.

I mean, there will be consequences.

And of course, it begs the question globally, will we be better or worse off after these deals hashed out?

All right, James, let's jump into our first topic, and it's a story we've seen played out in politics plenty of times before.

After the budget, backlash comes the inevitable backflip.

On Thursday, the government announced a series of carve-outs from the changes to capital gains taxes and a backdown on part of its changes to trusts.

After a few weeks of outcry from all sorts of groups, James, take us through the key details.

And what we've learned, James, and this is not new news by any means.

I mean, you can read about it back in the Bible, but people hate the prospect of paying more tax.

You know, they just do.

People see their wealth or money as hard earned and very often it is.

So whenever we have any tinkering with tax in recent years, both the way it's collected or the volume it's collected in, there's huge pushback.

So the CGT is just the latest example.

I mean, we had superannuation, remember, with Treasurer Jim Chalmers a couple of years ago, wanted to go after unrealized gains, and then he backed down and indexed the $3 million limit to concessional tax treatment a year.