James Thomson

Not well.

That's right.

I did sort of sit there in the budget lockup, Alan, thinking yesterday, you know, there is a bit of talk from the Treasurer at times like this.

Obviously, the forward estimates cover the next five years and some of the budget projections go out for a decade.

And you sort of do think, you look at some of these projections and you think along the lines of Andrew's questions.

What's the economy going to look like in 10 years, five years even?

will any of this, you know, any of the firestorm about CGT and negative gearing make a jot of difference if, as Andrew says, we did have unemployment of 20%?

We would have some serious...

We will have some serious budgetary and economic problems that will make all that look like window dressing, wouldn't we?

And none of that is really even remotely canvassed in the budget.

Yeah, yeah.

I think it's a bit like the situation in Iran.

Everyone's just hoping it'll sort itself out.

Maybe it will.

I don't know.

No.

Well, I disagree with that.

If you thought that unemployment was going to go to 10% to 20% over the next 5 to 10 years, surely the biggest item in yesterday's budget would have been a retraining package, the likes of which the Australian economy has never seen.

a skills and workforce realignment package, some sort of different way of taxing, you know, an announcement on how we're going to tax token, AI token usage, something like that.

Yeah, yeah, that's true.