Just over a month ago, Angus Taylor announced the biggest tax reform policy since the carbon tax, possibly since the GST.

Nobody is talking about it.

The centrepiece promise of his Budget in reply speech to index the personal income tax brackets sunk from public discussion without sight within mere days.

He has since ramped up his political attacks to DEFCON 1.

In shades of Tony Abbott’s relentless assault on the Gillard government, Taylor has loudly, passionately insisted at his almost daily news conferences that Australia “simply has to get rid of this rotten Prime Minister and this rotten Government”.

He has said it over and over again.

It isn’t working.

Few are listening to Angus Taylor.

Pauline Hanson has sucked all the oxygen away from the Coalition leader’s political message, leaving him gasping for air and for relevance.

So, having failed to cut through on policy and politics Taylor is now going personal.

It is the last refuge of the desperate Opposition leader.

It sometimes works.

But it is always dangerous.

This week, Taylor launched a personal campaign intended to smear Anthony Albanese’s integrity by insinuation, if not direct allegation.

He sanctioned questions from his backbench about Albanese’s sale of three investment properties over the past five years.

The most recent of those sales was in 2024, two years before Albanese’s spectacular backflip on negative gearing and capital gains tax in last month’s Federal Budget.

The Coalition had circulated its own analysis suggesting that Albanese had paid about $200,000 less tax on the profit from those combined sales than he would have done if he had sold them under the new regime.

“Given the Prime Minister’s investment success, can he explain why it’s fair for him to make $200,000 and then pull up this ladder of opportunity from millions of aspirational Australians,” asked Nationals MP Alison Penfold.

Albanese’s response began dispassionately.

He said that all his arrangements had been declared appropriately.

Then he set his sights on Taylor, declaring with a finger jabbing in the Opposition Leader’s direction: “The truth is that I didn’t inherit wealth!” he said.

“What I did was work hard, save for a deposit and buy my own home!”

When Taylor interjected, Albanese shot back that if the Opposition Leader wanted to get down and dirty over personal affairs he should have asked the question himself rather than palming it off to a junior backbencher.

The Prime Minister then invoked an epithet John Howard levelled to such devastating effect against Albanese’s friend and mentor Kim Beazley during the 1998 election campaign: “But he didn’t have the ticker!”

Western Sydney independent Dai Le had earned the ire of the Prime Minister by first questioning whether any Government members or their families had derived “private financial benefit” from knowing about the property tax changes before they were introduced.

Pauline Hanson then dispensed with all subtlety, as is her wont, and weaponised the attack in the Senate.

“The Prime Minister’s got his housing investments,” she said during the tax debate on Tuesday.

“I think it’s a conflict of interest! I really do!

“He knew what was coming. He knew the laws were going to be changed. So, he sold his investment properties and secured himself his house at $4.3 million.”

A day later the Coalition added its own imputations in the House of Representatives.

To believe that Albanese began offloading investment properties before he was even Prime Minister to avoid tax changes he wasn’t even contemplating, five years before abandoning a key election promise and increasing property taxes requires a suspension of disbelief that is almost beyond human capability.

This is a man who sold two of his investments as part of a divorce settlement, then sold another to fund the purchase of a beachside home at Copacabana for him and his now-wife to live in after politics.

For the Opposition and Hanson, though, it is much more about the allegation than the facts. They hope some of the smear sticks.

But opposition parties that embark on such personal campaigns ought to expect blowback.

Modern governments have largely dispensed with the political convention which dictates that when your opponents go low, you go high.

In an era of outrageous falsities, impulsive wars and cage matches on the White House lawns, such quaint civilities as turning the other cheek have been rendered hopelessly arcane.

If governments are hit, they hit back. Hard.

When parties abandon policy and politics for the personal, they should brace themselves for a return of fire.

Mark Riley is the Seven Network’s political editor