Karen Middleton

the desperation and the desire for them to do something to change the system.

You know, I've got a piece in the Monthly this month looking at the levels of anxiety in the community and the sorts of sentiment that is delivering support to Pauline Hanson's One Nation and talked to some pollsters and social researchers about that.

And one of the messages that came through there from people, which I thought was really fascinating, was the sentiment that

If you've got two houses, the tax system helps you more than if you've got two jobs.

And that is the sentiment, really, that we've heard from Jim Chalmers in the delivery of his budget.

The press conference that he gave explaining the budget in the lock-up to journalists, he was talking very much about that.

He was saying, we want the tax system to be fairer to people who earn their income through working and not as generous to people who earn their income from passive investments and assets.

because he says it's out of whack, it's out of balance, and it needs to be rebalanced, and that's very much the emphasis.

So in that sense, it's a very Labor budget.

It is really trying to shift that back to be fair to working people, but it's not going to be without some pain in the short term, and certainly there are some groups that are going to find it very difficult.

I mean, there are some...

changes to the tax for business as well to try and protect business from the worst of the economic crisis.

And there are some pretty dire forecasts in here.

And so, you know, there's a lot of sort of uncertainty about all of this.

And the government has taken a big risk, a big political risk, in making these changes in this tough budget at this time.

But they've decided they've got the political capital they need to spend it and that Australians are calling out for something to change.