There is a word for a government that breaks explicit election promises, targets the savings and investments of its most reliable older voters, strips their private health insurance rebates and then tells them it is all in the name of fairness.
The word is reckless.
The Albanese government’s 2026-27 budget, handed down on Tuesday night, has been dressed up in the language of intergenerational equity. Jim Chalmers and his colleagues want you to understand that this is about levelling the playing field for young Australians locked out of the housing market. It is, the Treasurer has said repeatedly, about “trying to level the playing field.”
What it actually is, measured in hard policy rather than political spin, is a systematic transfer of wealth away from the generation of Australians who built this country’s prosperity – the baby boomers and older retirees – toward a younger demographic that the government has decided is the more electorally lucrative investment.
The polls are already showing how that calculation is going.
A Roy Morgan snap poll conducted in the 48 hours immediately after the budget found 59 per cent of Australians disapprove of the way Anthony Albanese is handling his job as Prime Minister, with One Nation surging to 32 per cent primary vote – virtually tied with Labor at 28.5 per cent. That is not a rounding error. That is a government in serious political trouble with its traditional base.
Let’s be specific, because the government is counting on voters not being.
The most immediately painful measure for older Australians is the removal of the age-based uplift in the private health insurance rebate. Currently, older Australians receive a higher rebate to reflect the reality that they use the health system more and their premiums are higher. The government has decided this is inequitable and has moved to standardise the rebate at 24 per cent regardless of age.
The result, according to National Seniors Australia’s own modelling, is that a couple aged over 70 currently paying $7,000 a year in private health insurance premiums will pay approximately $830 more annually. Rather than reform the rebate so it is more effective at retaining older people, the government chose to take an axe to a knife fight – effectively chopping tens of thousands of pensioners from the private health system and burdening others with higher costs to remain in it.
The ABC reports that the government expects around 44,000 older Australians to drop their private health insurance as a result of this change, with the measure forecast to save $11 billion from 2025-26 to 2036-37. That $11 billion saving to the government becomes $11 billion in additional costs, reduced cover and higher risk for older Australians who will now either pay more or go without.
Then there is the capital gains tax overhaul. From 1 July 2027, the 50 per cent CGT discount that has been the foundation of Australian investment planning for a generation will be replaced with a minimum 30 per cent tax on capital gains. With around 83 per cent of the benefit of the current CGT discount going to the top 10 per cent of taxpayers by income, the government wanted to even the playing field for younger Australians. What it has not explained is that for many older Australians, investment property is not a luxury. It is a retirement strategy built over decades under the rules the government has now changed after promising not to.
Labor has faced intense scrutiny over its decision to go ahead with the changes after repeatedly pledging during the 2025 election that it would not pursue reforms to capital gains tax or negative gearing. When your political strategy rests on broken promises, you had better be certain the people you are breaking them to cannot reach you at the ballot box. Albanese and Chalmers appear to have made a calculated decision that they can afford to write off older voters.
That is a very large bet to place.
Then there is the trust crackdown – a minimum 30 per cent tax on discretionary trust distributions from 2028. Many older Australians have used family trusts as part of legitimate estate and retirement planning, often on professional advice, over many years. The government will introduce a minimum tax of 30 per cent on discretionary trusts from 1 July 2028 with some exceptions. The small print matters, but the headline reality is that the rules are changing again.
And negative gearing, now limited to new builds for new investors. In an ominous sign for renters, when a similar policy was introduced in New Zealand in 2021 it resulted in higher rental prices, leading to the policy being abandoned only three years later. That detail has been largely absent from the government’s cheerful projections.
To be scrupulously fair, the budget is not entirely without concessions for older Australians.
The government is committing $1 billion to fully subsidise and remove co-contributions for at-home personal care services through the Support at Home program. The PBS maximum general co-payment will be reduced to $25 and the concessional rate will be frozen at $7.70 until 2030. An additional 5,000 aged care beds will be created as part of a $3.7 billion aged care package.
The government will also extend payment of the full pension supplement from six to 12 weeks for pensioners temporarily overseas – expected to benefit around 92,000 pensioners who travel for extended periods.
These are genuine improvements. Cheaper medicines matter. More aged care beds matter. The Support at Home changes matter deeply to families under pressure. No fair-minded observer would dismiss them.
But they do not compensate for $11 billion stripped from the private health insurance system that disproportionately protects older Australians, a CGT overhaul that restructures the investment landscape under which an entire generation planned their retirement, and a broken election promise on negative gearing that now hangs over the government like a persistent smell.
National Seniors Australia, drawing on feedback from its 285,000 members, had called for a Seniors Dental Benefit Scheme providing eligible pensioners $500 annually for dental care, increased rent assistance, a $150 energy credit and expanded concessions for pensioners. CEO Chris Grice said older Australians were increasingly being forced to make difficult choices. “Older Australians should not be forced to choose between their health and their household budget.” Most of those requests were not in the budget.
Here is the political reality that the government appears to have decided it can safely ignore.
At the start of 2026, more than 22 per cent of Australians were aged 65 or over, up from 16 per cent in 2020. That is not a fringe constituency. It is more than one in five Australians – and they vote in disproportionately high numbers. In every Australian federal election, turnout among older voters dramatically outpaces turnout among younger voters. The young Australians this budget is designed to court are also the demographic least likely to show up on polling day.
Baby boomers told the Daily Mail they are incensed by the tax changes set to hit their investments and savings. One Nation leader Pauline Hanson called it a Sheriff of Nottingham budget. “We were the baby boomers. We didn’t have a lot. We had to go without,” she said. “We had second-hand furniture, second-hand clothes. Then we saved and we invested to create that wealth. All the government is doing now is stripping that wealth and handing it to others.”
Hanson is not always right. But she is rarely wrong about which way the wind is blowing among older, conservative-leaning Australians who feel the system is no longer on their side.
Newspoll recorded a steady decline in Albanese’s approval ratings between mid-November 2025 and mid-April 2026, from 47 per cent to 40 per cent, with his dissatisfaction rating climbing from 47 per cent to 57 per cent. That was before the budget landed. The Roy Morgan snap poll conducted after budget night shows those numbers moving in the same direction.
A government that governs for everyone governs for the long term. A government that governs for a demographic it has decided is more numerically valuable in the short run governs for a term and a half at best.
The baby boomer generation built the hospitals, paid the taxes, raised the children and created the superannuation balances that now underpin this country’s retirement system. They did it under a set of rules that the government has now rewritten.
There will be a reckoning. There always is.
Brian Crisp is the editor of Starts at 60.