Here is the great paradox of the Albanese Labor government as it approaches its first year in office.
How has it come to pass that we have a government hellbent on keeping a promise most Australians would be happy to see it break while breaking a promise most Australians expected it to keep?
Let’s delve into the second part of that amazing, headshaking, bewildering, conundrum first.
Labor came to power promising to leave no one behind. Yet Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, Treasurer Jim Chalmers and Co. have deliberately left some of Australia’s poorest and disadvantaged people behind now for almost that full year.
And make no mistake; that’s a broken promise. An enormous, broken, promise for a supposedly centrist/left government. Yet it’s one that the government seems to think holds no great political pain from breaking it.
Now, almost a year in, that government deigns to increase the jobseeker rate by $40 a fortnight – $2.85 a day (less than a coffee or a loaf of bread) – ensuring a very large number of people in supposedly one of the world’s wealthiest countries remain well under the poverty line. That is well and truly still leaving a hell of a lot of Australians behind.
Jobseekers, of course, are just one cohort of our population now making choices between paying their rent or power bills or putting food on the table.
We are now left, the morning after the Budget, with Treasurer Chalmers forced to present the lamest of arguments that while that increase perhaps wasn’t enough despite being all the coffers could afford, some people were arguing the rate shouldn’t have been lifted at all. Really? Oh, so that’s all right then?
Let’s swing back now to the first part of this amazing paradox, namely the government’s apparent obsession with keeping the Turnbull and Morrison government’s unfair and so un-Labor-like Stage 3 income tax cuts. You know, the ones that give people on $200,000 or more a year a $9000 tax break, while low-income earners are thrown scraps.
As The Bug’s resident political ranter, there is one thing I have not budged on since about a week after Albanese took power. My belief that they should have faced the cameras, pointed Morrison’s very cooked books at them, adopted their most “we are so frightfully sorry to be doing this” sad faces and there and then announced those Stage Three tax cuts dead buried and cremated. A promise broken when it should have been broken.
And I’ll add this as Australia’s most unreliable amateur psepholgist, my best guess is that Labor’s current Newspoll lead – 56/44 – would have been no less now if Labor had ditched those tax cuts way back then.
Instead, we have Chalmers forced to run the embarrassing line in Canberra this morning that those tax cuts are needed to fix bracket creep. He knows that’s bullshit and it’s embarrassing to see him run that line.
There’s been no more damage done to this relatively new government than its persistence that these tax cuts that heavily favour the rich, and men over women, must go ahead. Media political experts of course have argued that the government’s tactics have been sound, namely to pretend ongoing support for the cuts until public objection to them grows to such a level that the government can then reluctantly agree and break that promise without political pain.
I call bullshit on that strategy. It’s based on a government being led on an issue, rather than leading on it. Where are the votes in that? Polls now months old show the Australian people want the tax cuts axed. Instead, we continue to have Albanese, Chalmers and Finance Minister Katy Gallagher tying themselves in knots with the old “our position hasn’t changed” and “besides the tax cuts don’t take place for two years” lines. Oops! Sorry… that’s a year now!
To get an idea of the mess they’ve got themselves in, listen to Greens leader Adam Brandt serving it up to them this morning. His entire attack was around the $69 billion those tax cuts are going to cost in the first four years alone! Close to $300 billion over a decade.
And where on earth is the logic of this “being led to do the right thing” strategy if the government eventually, as most people expect, breaks that tax cut promise anyway? And much closer to the next election. It’s nonsensical. I can see Forrest Gump sitting on his bench saying: “Stoopid is as stoopid does.”
All this leads to something very sad; what quite possibly is the real reason behind this strategy. That in Albanese, Chalmers and Gallagher we have three senior ministers shit scared of what damage the mainstream media, led by News Corp Australia, the Nine newspapers and the radio shock jocks, could do to their chances of a second term if they break a promise they were stupidly wedged into supporting before the 2019 poll and promised to keep to get across the line last year.
Such gutlessness, for mine, would be unforgiveable.
And so we now combine a promise broken and a promise being kept and shake our heads as those three ministers fumble and stumble about, using the excuse that those looming tax cut costs are seriously impacting what they can now afford to spend, and then reaching for morrisonian-level arguments that the best way job-seekers can get out of their dire positions is to get a job. I’ve switched off a bit for fear of hearing them any time soon start to argue that the best way for struggling Australians to overcome soaring house and flat rent prices is to buy their own property!
It all goes back to that decision made shortly after their election. That trio and the government in general could have adopted a little bit of Gough Whitlam’s crash through or crash approach, axed the tax cuts and immediately improved the lot of so many people in real trouble with the Australian public knowing clearly where the funds for that would be coming from. Done some Labor-like things and not given a rat’s arse about a meaningless one-off surplus.
Instead, they have tied themselves up in knots. And the increasing flak they are copping from supposedly their own side of politics is totally warranted. The friendly fire from citizen journalists on Twitter is becoming withering.
In trying to be too clever by half, the Albanese government has ended up looking gutless, cowardly and perhaps worst of all, stupid. To quote Gough again, it’s time – right now – to put things right.
Don Gordon-Brown
Footnote: Readers might have noticed that I have not suggested the Albanese government would have also been scared of the damage the LNP Opposition could have inflicted had they broken the income-tax promise early. That would indeed be fantasyland stuff and dreadfully unfair to them.
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