Michael Baume has the measure of it. Anthony Albanese, Albo, is not a modern Charles II, the merry monarch who restored the old order after the chaos. He is a new Oliver Cromwell: the man who tears down, who regards the established social and economic arrangements as obstacles to be incinerated in the name of a higher Leftist cause. The language of "transformative reform" and "real change" is not accidental. It is the self-description of a government that sees the Australia of private ownership, limited government and individual aspiration as something to be remodelled rather than conserved.
Nowhere is the Cromwellian impulse clearer than in housing. The Budget measures on negative gearing and capital gains tax discounts were sold as fairness for first-home buyers. In practice they function as a wrecking ball swung at the private rental market. Investors face higher effective costs; the incentive to supply established dwellings for rent declines; landlords who remain will seek higher yields. Modelling from the industry already points to tighter vacancies and upward pressure on rents, precisely the opposite of what struggling tenants need. Home ownership, already retreating from its post-war peak, is pushed further out of reach for the very people the government claims to champion. A generation is being locked into permanent tenancy while the political class congratulates itself on progressive tax design.
The perversity is that the victims keep voting for the authors of the policy. Renters, whose share of households has climbed toward one-third, have deserted the Coalition in large numbers. The Liberals once commanded a decisive majority of that vote; now they lag badly. The Greens have surged. Labor's primary support among renters holds steady enough, and with preference flows the government remains the beneficiary. Those whose path to a house and garden is being systematically lengthened still look Left for relief. It is a political world turned upside down: the party of home ownership loses the people who most want homes, while the party of intervention gains from the scarcity its own interventions help create.
Baume is right that this is more than a policy failure. It is an assault on a core piece of the Australian identity, the concrete expression of frugality and independence that Menzies once celebrated. When government enlarges its reach across the economy under the banner of change, when productivity stalls, when debt climbs and social cohesion frays, the pattern is consistent. The established order is not being restored; it is being dismantled piece by piece.
What the country needs is not another round of transformative ambition. It needs the opposite: a deliberate campaign of restoration. Restore the conditions that once made widespread home ownership normal. Restore the incentives that keep private capital flowing into rental supply. Restore the limited-government framework that allowed ordinary people to build equity rather than remain permanent clients of the state. The Cromwellian project has had its run. Australia has had a gutful of change for change's sake. The only change now required is a change of government.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2026/08/business-robbery-etc-149/