Jim Chalmers has doubled down on personal swipes at Angus Taylor, saying the Opposition Leader was “born already at the top of the ladder” and then “fail(ed) upwards”.

The Liberal leader brushed off the Treasurer’s attacks and said he should focus on his day job – just a day after Prime Minister Anthony Albanese urged everyone to turn the temperature down in political debate.

Dr Chalmers used a speech to an ALP policy forum, a key internal body that will feed into the party’s national conference in July, to defend the Budget and reiterate previous Question Time attacks on his opponents.

Changes unveiled in the May Budget to replace the 50 per cent discount on capital gains with one based on inflation, and apply a minimum 30 per cent rate to the taxable portion, have proven controversial because they go beyond property investments to hit all assets including shares and sales of small businesses or start-ups.

But the Government has insisted the change is necessary to tackle a broken property market that has locked out younger Australians.

Dr Chalmers said the Coalition and One Nation were demanding a change in government so that a broken status quo could stay the same.

“Our opponents who say we’re pulling up the ladder don’t understand there’s not much point in a ladder with the first few rungs missing. Not everybody is born already at the top of the ladder like Angus Taylor was, not everybody fails upwards like he has. And unlike One Nation, we vote the way workers need us to, not the way Gina Rinehart tells us to,” he said.

“They irony of their position is they want to change the government in order to leave everything as it is – a truly absurd proposition.

“Too often the story of this Budget is told by the biggest beneficiaries of these current arrangements, not the biggest victims of the broken status quo.

“Of course there are always those who want everything to stay exactly the same. We’re not among them.”

Mr Taylor, speaking alongside one-time leadership rival Andrew Hastie in Mandurah, said the Treasurer “should focus on his job” and that he was proud of his family background.

“My parents worked, as so many farmers and small business people do, seven days a week, weekdays, daytime bled into nighttime, weekdays into weekends. Holidays would get interrupted regularly, because that’s what you do when you’re running a small business or a farm,” he said.

“They worked hard, and they did well. And my three brothers and I benefited from their hard work, and I’ve sought to do the same for my four kids.”

Dr Chalmers made a more substantive defence of the budget to investment bankers in a separate speech at a Morgan Stanley event, where he argued his “tax reforms are motivated by allocative efficiency” to get investment flowing to where it would be most productive.

Mr Taylor faced his own One Nation-related stoush after a factional ally and frontbencher Tony Pasin floated the idea of the Liberals doing deals with the minor party to not run three-cornered contests in particular seats.

This would be similar to the agreement the Liberals have with coalition partners the Nationals to not challenge each other’s sitting MPs.

Mr Taylor dismissed the idea out of hand in a breakfast television appearance, and again at the doorstop.

“There’ll be no carve-up of seats. What we’re going to be doing is carving up a Labor Party that’s failed this country, that’s what I’ll be carving up,” Mr Taylor said.

“We’ll go to toe to toe in every seat in this country to win every vote we can.”

Veteran election analyst Antony Green pointed out that One Nation won the primary vote in the State seat overlapping with Mr Pasin’s electorate of Barker at the March SA election, saying, “You can understand why (he) thinks a Liberal no-compete deal with One Nation is a good idea”.

Shadow treasurer Tim Wilson said his party had be mindful of who the individual candidates were in each seat when it decided on preference deals, a point also made by senior conservative Liberal James Paterson.

“We’ve said already there will be no peace talks, there will be no surrender to Labor, to One Nation, or any other party in our approach,” Mr Wilson told ABC Perth.

“We don’t know who all the candidates are going to be on all the ballot papers. The leader of that party (One Nation) has said publicly that there has been infiltrations of extremists in her own ranks. I didn’t say that; she said that.

“And so we have to be mindful, and we shouldn’t be hitching our wagon to somebody else’s star.”

Both men are in Perth and will attend a couple of Liberal Party fundraisers.

One Nation leader Pauline Hanson wasn’t asked directly about the idea of carving up seats.

She said that “former Liberals are starting to wake up to themselves” and she was offering people something different.

Last week, Mr Albanese labelled Mr Taylor “Temu Abbott”, a riff on the “Temu Trump” attack Labor borrowed from online influences to use against Peter Dutton last term.

Dr Chalmers has made previous personal jibes about Mr Taylor’s wealth and background – including saying he “was born with a silver foot in his mouth” back in February and an earlier version of the born at the top of the ladder line in the days after the Budget – as has the Prime Minister.

“I wonder why, Mr Speaker, a question about properties or wealth or inheritance or trusts wasn’t asked by this bloke?” Mr Albanese mused during Question Time on May 14, pointing at the Opposition Leader.

They’ve also made similar attacks on One Nation previously to the line Dr Chalmers used on Thursday.