A decade ago, Anthony Albanese was a Labor Opposition frontbencher in his early fifties who tried to appear cool by styling himself as “DJ Albo” playing indie rock.

To get in with the in crowd, he started declaring who he voted for in Triple J’s Hottest 100 countdown and guest presented Rage on the ABC, which was about as cringeworthy as an ageing dad, wearing a baseball cap backwards, attempting to grind a skateboard in front of teenagers.

Now, as a 63-year second-term Prime Minister four years away from qualifying for the age pension, he is hardly resembling a disc jockey able to spin multiple turntables.

His political style is more resembling a scratched, broken record where the problems of the May Budget are being played on repeat — five months on.

The Labor Government he micromanages is sounding a lot like New York hip hoppers Salt-N-Pepa best known for their 1991 hit, “Let’s Talk About Sex” about polite society being a little too coy because “people might misunderstand what we’re tryin’ to say, you know?”

When it comes to taboo topics, the Albanese Government’s cover version may as well be titled, “Let’s Talk About Tax” given the Prime Minister didn’t want to talk about unwinding capital gains tax concessions at all during the last election campaign.

The Alliance of Industry Associations — representing 30 groups including small businesses, farmers and builders — has written an open letter to Treasurer Jim Chalmers about Labor’s inadequate consultation on its contentious tax policies.

The letter was dated Tuesday, the day before Dr Chalmers introduced legislation to Parliament, to impose a minimum 30 per cent tax on the incomes of discretionary trusts from July 1, 2028, unless they restructured to become fixed trusts without the ability to alter who received distributions.

Australia’s 240,000 small businesses, that use discretionary trusts to protect their assets, are angry at Labor’s plan to make taxes on trusts better align with the income taxes typically paid by salary earners.

The alliance, led by the Business Council of Australia, noted the 12 business days of consultation, from September 3 to September 18, was hardly adequate.

“We write on behalf of the undersigned Alliance of Industry Associations to raise a growing concern about Government’s inadequate consultation on recent complex legislative and regulatory reforms,” the letter said.

The Albanese Government is so unpopular that NSW Labor this week tried to politically cash in by offering to waive stamp duty for discretionary trusts that restructured to avoid paying the Federal Government’s new income and capital gains taxes on trust structures.

With State Premier Chris Minns facing the voters in five months’ time, his Treasurer Daniel Mookhey declared becoming an excluded election trust would not incur a State tax.

“While the Federal Government’s proposed tax changes are still some way off, we want businesses to have as much certainty as possible, as early as possible, so they can carry on with more confidence,” Mr Mookhey said.

The only problem is Federal Labor is already proposing rollover relief from July 1, 2027, for those restructuring out of a discretionary trust into other arrangements, such as a company or a fixed trust.

Whatever relief is offered won’t stop small businesses from losing the flexibility to decide who receives assets from a trust structure, nor the likely $50,000 in legal costs to restructure.

Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry chief executive Andrew McKellar said stamp duty exemptions, so far offered by Labor State governments in NSW and Western Australia, were just false hope.

“Partial stamp duty exemptions will not protect small businesses caught up in this big new tax hit, and no government should pretend otherwise,” he told The Nightly.

“At best, the stamp duty exemption being talked about is false hope. At worst, it is a trap for small business. Either all affected small businesses are exempt from stamp duty on this trust tax or the entire proposal must be pulped.”

ACCI’s chief became the centre of another drama this week when PM Albo bragged to a dinner about intervening to postpone a ban on the Australian Taxation Office accepting credit card payments for tax debts after receiving a text from Mr McKellar.

Dr Chalmers was humiliated, after it was revealed his boss had stepped in so the tax office’s credit card payment ban — to account for the Reserve Bank’s ban on surcharge fees — would be delayed until July 1.

This won’t entirely satiate business groups, who want the ATO to simply absorb the costs of processing card transactions.

But it showed the Prime Minister was willing to throw his Treasurer under a bus.

Unlike Dolly Parton’s extra-wide Australian tour bus in 2011 — when Albo stepped in as transport minister to override the bureaucrats — the Prime Minister isn’t being considered a political hero this time for his political micromanagement.

Mr Albanese has long made a career, in Labor’s hard left faction by trying to present himself as cool.

Despite also living with his mother well into adulthood, as a first-term MP in 1998, he personally attacked then Liberal prime minister John Howard for living at home with mum until he was 32 “wearing his shorts and long white socks, listening to Pat Boone albums and waiting for the Saturday night church dance”.

The member for Grayndler, from Sydney’s gentrified inner west, overlooked the fact that for all Mr Howard’s fashion faults, he at least won an election mandate for the GST in 1998 and only introduced legislation, in 1999, after two years of consultations without surprises.

No amount of spin from “DJ Albo” changes the fact the hipster now living in The Lodge had no mandate for his Budget taxes and is to blame for unpopular taxes remaining a political earworm.