This budget, Labor grapples with a world gone populist

The political challenge for a budget that is less than it claims but more ambitious than Labour’s status quo is both short- and long-term, and the threat is domestic and international populism.

With the budget’s economic forecasts tied to the Mad King, Donald Trump is the key foreign threat depending on whether he can end the disastrous US-Israeli war on Iran without causing too much global economic devastation.

The government is still confident that we can survive a much larger, longer, $200-a-barrel energy energy crisis of the kind the Treasury is modeling without a huge rise in unemployment; but with inflation rising above 7% rather than the 5% forecast, this is unlikely to cause damage to either the government’s or household’s finances.