Among the most controversial measures in Tuesday’s budget were the changes to negative gearing, family trusts and capital gains tax.

They were a response to growing inequality between generations, where first-home buyers are being outbid by older, wealthier property investors who can claim tax deductions not available to the young.

Predictably, conservative media outlets screamed from the rooftops that the changes amounted to a government tax grab.

So did shadow treasurer Tim Wilson, quickly followed by Opposition Leader Angus Taylor.

The Coalition’s position that it would vote against these reforms is not surprising. But shocking me right out of my brain was its commitment to repeal the measures if the Coalition were to form government after the next election.

Aspiring first-home buyers now know for sure who’s on their side and who wants them to remain renters for the rest of their lives.

The Liberal Party’s philosophy on tax hasn’t changed in decades.

I’ve been around long enough to remember the Taxation Review Committee commissioned by the Whitlam government and chaired by Professor Russell Mathews, who concluded that income tax had so many legally sanctioned shelters that it had become “a voluntary tax for the wealthy”.

That conclusion, coupled with Treasury advice, led to the Keating tax reforms of September 1985.

Paul Keating’s reform package included the introduction of a capital gains tax that applied to real (inflation-adjusted) gains.

The Liberal opposition was enraged. The capital gains tax was an attack on capital, and it couldn’t have that.

So, after returning to government it commissioned the Ralph review, which in 2001 recommended a generous 50 per cent discount on capital gains.

In Tuesday’s budget, Treasurer Jim Chalmers announced a return to fairness in taxing capital gains, restoring the tax base to Keating’s real, realised gains.

He further announced that negative gearing could apply only to new homes. The tax concession on family trusts, too, would be made less generous.

The budget was framed around inequity between older and younger. Photo: Mike Bowers

All three tax concessions – on capital gains, negative gearing and family trusts – have been giving well-off baby boomers a big financial advantage at auctions over first-home buyers who lack the income to take advantage of these tax breaks.

The Albanese government concluded that it was no longer tolerable for well-off boomers looking to acquire a property as a tax-sheltered investment to have such a significant advantage.

Upon learning of the government’s decision to make the playing field more level between boomers and younger first-home buyers, the Coalition leadership lost its mind, pledging not only to vote against these reforms but to reverse them if elected to government.

In doing so, the Coalition has picked a side – baby boomers over young Australians struggling to afford their first homes.

They also sided with Pauline Hanson – again – who described Labor’s reforms as “communism”.

Then, in his budget reply on Thursday, Taylor sought to outdo One Nation by announcing a Coalition government would accept only as many migrants each year as houses that were built in Australia the preceding year.

It is easy to imagine Hanson saying: “Why didn’t I think of that?”

In any year in Australia there are more migrants living here than those who arrived the previous year. They include temporary visa-holders studying at our universities and temporary workers in areas where we have skill shortages such as nurses and aged-care workers.

We have these migrants because it is in Australia’s national interest to do so.

Why would overseas students come to Australia to study if, a year or two into their degrees, they could be deported because of an unrelated temporary housing slump?

And what about partners of those migrants who have been granted permanent residency on their way to citizenship? Would those partners be deported in a housing slump?

These policies raise the spectre of Trumpian-style large-scale deportations.

Remember Minneapolis, where ICE officers went door to door, arresting people? That’s undoubtedly the intention – to show the Liberal Party is tougher on migrants than One Nation.

The Liberal Party may have decided to compete with One Nation, but it is a losing battle and a morally unworthy one.

The further the Liberals sidle up to One Nation, the further to the right One Nation will shift.

Politically, the Liberals have already been decimated in the big cities with only a handful of moderates remaining.

How abandoned by their own party must those few surviving moderate Liberals feel? Moderates such as Julian Leeser in Berowra, who is a very decent MP.

And as a member of the Liberal leadership team, how does Tim Wilson feel about Taylor writing his political epitaph in the city seat of Goldstein?

The Coalition leadership, with its freshly released tax and immigration policies, has abandoned the sensible centre.

For every rural and regional seat it tries to protect against One Nation, it is putting a city seat at risk to Labor, the teals or even the Greens.

Usually, politicians have an acute survival instinct. But that instinct seems to have deserted the Liberals.

Craig Emerson was trade minister in 2010-2013 and was an adviser to prime minister Bob Hawke during the Keating tax reforms and the parliamentary immigration debate when John Howard claimed there was too much Asian immigration to Australia