Stealing Shorten’s shorts

In 1845 Benjamin Disraeli said of Britain’s Tory Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel, that he had ‘caught the Whigs bathing and ran off with their clothes’. Malcolm Turnbull’s and Treasurer Scott Morrison’s 2017-18 budget seems likewise to have left Bill Shorten naked. With millions of words already uttered about the details of that astonishing performance, its sheer effrontery is still sinking in, and its consequences for the Liberal Party’s future have barely begun to be comprehended.