… but the underlying message is always the same!

The totally unwarranted and completely undeserved “we know it all” arrogance of Australia’s mainstream media is gathering steam – hard as that is to believe with the firebox full of coal and the pressure gauges in the red zone.

The latest issue where a hubris-choked MSM knows best is how damaging it will be for the Albanese Labor government if it breaks its election promise to proceed with the stage-three income tax cuts in 2024.

As usual, this view by the vast majority of MSM politics writers/columnists/essayists dovetails ever so neatly – you can barely see the joins – with Peter Dutton’s assessment of the political cost to Labor in the public mind if those cuts are axed.

Yes, by design because it’s no accident, our MSM politics bods seem totally at ease sprouting LNP talking points – no matter how stupid it makes them look.

That the MSM makes such claims with such brazen confidence beggars belief considering the number of things they’d totally misjudged over recent times. But if there’s one thing you can’t accuse our MSM politicati of is a propensity to be daunted. Or an ability to ever blush.

Mere mortals might have suffered from self doubt if they had repeatedly claimed that each new “gaffe” from Albanese during the federal election campaign had cost him the election.

Certain MSM scribes might reasonably have blushed and hung their heads in shame for completely misreading what poll after poll was telling us: Labor was heading for a win.

We now have this almost universal belief among these gurus that political Armageddon awaits Anthony Albanese if he renegs on a promise repeatedly made before the poll back in May.

Let’s turn to just one of our MSM experts who sees great dangers for Labor for breaking that tax cut promise: the SMH’s David Crowe.

The paper’s chief political writer a few days back had a sure-fire solution to how Labor can avoid the calamity that he assumes such a broken promise would wreak on Labor.

All Labor has to do is have an early election before the legislated cuts are due to start and seek a mandate from the electorate for not bringing in the cuts that favour the higher paid and men over women.

“The history lesson for Anthony Albanese is there for all to see. If the prime minister believes the stage three tax cuts have to change, and that he must break his election promise for the good of the budget and the country, he has to be brave enough to put it to the people,” Crowe opines.

Now your ranter-in-residence could quibble with the general logic of Crowe’s piece, as the heading shows us. That early poll is not a way of breaking a promise; it’s presenting a new one for approval. You can’t break a promise you’ve abandoned. It’s a bit of a chicken and egg thing maybe? Then again, Pedantic is my middle name.

Something a bit more bizarre from Crowe is his view that if Labor called an early election as he suggests as a solution to Labor’s dilemma, the nightmare timing would be Labor’s own fault!

Phew! It’s always Labor’s fault, right? I suspect Crowe’s reasoning is based on Labor backing the cuts at the last poll and then foolishly not taking into account how the timing restraints for upcoming Senate polls, etc, etc, would limit the window of opportunity for the early poll Labor hadn’t even thought about until Crowe suggesting it as a way of breaking a promise by not breaking it. Anyone else starting to get a headache?

“Albanese and Chalmers boarded the train for the stage three tax cuts at the May election and are in no position to complain about the journey,” says Crowe, preferring old-fashioned steam locomotion as he builds up steam himself, the only problem being that he’s left logic and fairness back at the platform.

Anyone else starting to think David needs a long vacation?

One of The Bug’s twitterati chums and a colleague of mine back at The Courier-Mail in another millennium summed up Crowe’s piece this way.

Writing the same drivel every day indeed!

But let’s be fair to Crowe. At least he’s trying to save Labor from itself; maybe deep down Crowe really doesn’t want to see a return of another decade of LNP rule after only one Labor term. Not that he’d ever say that out loud; it would be awful sitting at a table all by yourself in one of the journos’ Canberra drinking holes while your former mates throw peanuts at you and call you a commie cunt.

But deep down, isn’t this “Labor will pay a big price!” from the MSM song sheet just the latest in a range of topics where the MSM are just plain wrong and large numbers of citizen journalists on social media are more or less if not absolutely right.

Crowe himself admits that the Albanese government has been kite-flying for a week over the possibility that the tax cuts could be abandoned or seriously tweaked further down the track.

So let’s look at the most recent poll taken during that kite-flying period: The SMH’s own Resolve poll of 1604 voters taken last Wednesday to Sunday. It has the Labor Party on 39 per cent primary vote to the LNP’s 30.

Respected psephologist Kevin Bonham says that amounts to a two-party-preferred vote of 58.9 to 41.1 in Labor’s favour. And that all makes very good sense given Labor’s primary vote back in May was 32.6 per cent.

And the latest Australia Institute poll shows support for the stage-three tax cuts continues to fall, with increased support for scrapping the $243 billion plan. It will cost more, by the way,

Taken between October 4 to 7, the poll found support for repealing the stage three-cuts jumped 7 percentage points from September. Support for repealing the tax cuts now sits at 48 per cent, with those opposed to the move unchanged at 22%. Those who were unsure or didn’t know about the tax cuts had fallen from 37% to 30%.

To this ranter, there is an almost palpable sense out there in voterland that $243 billion in tax cuts over 10 years, if it wasn’t already a bad idea back when, certainly is now in a nation with crippling public debt, the urgent need to spend large wads of money on important things and terrible economic headwinds building around the world.

And yet, once again, there’s this almost total dichotomy between the MSM political talking and writing heads and the good, untrained folk – the citizen journalists – on social media platforms, especially Twitter.

Almost to a man and woman, the MSM who largely despise Twitter is screaming doom and gloom for Albanese if he breaks his tax cut promise; The Bug’s twitterfield has the almost exact view: Axe the fucking things and get on with it. And don’t be afraid of how the MSM and the LNP will react. They’re both fucked.

My ever-increasing gut feeling is that the Twitterati have once again gotten things right; the MSM terribly, terribly wrong.

Your ranter-in-residence has mentioned before he keeps a feather close by to knock himself over with if anyone in the MSM ever wants to show some guts and some independent clinical thinking based on reality and not right-wing rhetoric and climb aboard the Twitter steam train that’s gathering pace on this issue.

My best guess is that I’ll never be reaching for it.

Don Gordon-Brown