Opposition Leader Bill Shorten is decidedly becalmed after this latest budget. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen It's not just the effrontery of a self-professed small-government titan taking a plug out of a free-market entity that would make Jeremy Corbyn blush, while merrily installing – on banks' hiring and firing practices – direct government controls with an unmistakeable Soviet whiff. Or the exuberant non-sequitur constituted by a government simultaneously insisting on one hand that giving banks a significant company tax cut will create jobs, and on the other that taxing them to kingdom come on their corporate bonds and Tier 2 capital instruments will work out just tickety-boo. The most central outrage committed by this budget – the most confounding tactical manoeuvre upon which its authors shamelessly embark – is that it is based on agreement with its political foes. It agrees that banks are essentially villains. It agrees that taxes need to rise to finance government spending. It agrees it is now foolish to imagine that any of the remaining propositions of the 2014 budget still staggering around in the national accounts like drunks refusing to leave a party will ever actually amount to anything. It agrees schools need more money. It agrees running up debt to build things that are productive is an OK thing to do. It agrees doctors should be paid more, and that the National Disability Insurance Scheme should be funded fully. It is difficult to overstate what a colossal shock to the political system this change of tack is.

Keep in mind that for years now we've chuntered along on the tacit understanding that the major political parties will disagree with each other even where they actually secretly are 100 per cent on the same page. Disagreement has, for some reason, come to be a non-negotiable element of mainstream politics, so its sudden abandonment is quite the broadside. No wonder both opposition leaders have been chucked off balance in recent days. Tony Abbott, whose personal aptitude for being the leader of the opposition is so unique that he has devised a flexible "work from government" arrangement allowing him to remain in the role indefinitely, was unusually quiet after Tuesday. In the old days, Abbott would have sniffed out such a big-taxing, high-spending budget like bacon frying two streets away, and kicked down doors to have at it.

But it was an almost deferential Abbott who offered his first impressions, late Wednesday, on a document at least partially dedicated to Tippexing the remaining traces of his own prime ministership from the fiscal landscape. "Given the circumstances that we find ourselves in, this is the best way forward, the best way to fund important programs and the best way to get back to surplus as quickly as we reasonably can," the former PM circumspectly told 2GB's Ben Fordham. Labor leader Bill Shorten made a valiant attempt at protest, but really: When you've been demanding for years that the prime minister muscle up to the banks and then you pick up the budget and find he's not only hit them for $6 billion but also put their regulatory nuts in a sling, what are you gonna do? Valiantly, if a little half-heartedly, Shorten swivelled his gun-barrels to accountants, announcing that a Labor government would limit to $3000 the amount any single taxpayer could claim in deductions for the expense of managing their tax affairs. Take that, accountants! Maybe you'll think twice about buggering up the Oscars next time.

Obviously, professional unpopularity is now a live factor in national tax policy ("They already don't like you very much", was Treasurer Scott Morrison's serious advice to the banks, while urging them to suck up his budget measures), so stand by for a series of bespoke tax imposts on parking inspectors, journalists and call-centre operators who ring you when you're in the bath. But Shorten is otherwise decidedly becalmed. It remains to be seen whether national consensus is now an actual thing, or just a brief and confusing interregnum from which we will soon be driven by a new round of bare-knuckle fighting. Annabel Crabb is an ABC writer and broadcaster. Twitter: @annabelcrab