Had I ever become the Australian prime minister I dreamt of being in my youth, I rather fancy I would have been much in the Gough Whitlam “crash through or crash!” mold. Without the stature, class or intelligence of that great man, of course.
Which means that I probably wouldn’t have lasted even the three years Gough did.
Probably not even the one year and 361 days that foolish fuckknuckle Tony Abbott lasted, and I wouldn’t have eaten a whole raw unpeeled onion or made Prince Philip an Australian knight. Probably wouldn’t have made a year if I’d ever been photographed in red budgie smugglers, although I suppose one should not underestimate the sympathy vote.
But one thing I’m remaining rock solid on if my sense of politics has any merit whatsoever is that incoming PM Anthony Albanese and Treasurer Jim Chalmers should have announced their intention to axe the third-stage personal income tax cuts about a week after last year’s election victory and the short time they had spent going through the Treasury’s cooked LNP books.
A broken promise? You bet your sweet patootie. Would it have cause some political harm? That’s debatable. At the time, I didn’t think they’d lose any bark at all over it; polls said the same. That’s not to say this nation’s disgraceful mainstream mediocre wouldn’t still be hanging on about it if they had.
But nothing will ever convince me otherwise: then was the time to do it. A year-and-a-half on, I despair at the pickle these two dunces have got them in with their “the cuts are legislated and we have no plans to change them” waffle.
Every column I have written about those third-stage cuts has stressed the point that they are the most un-Labor like policy I have ever seen. Won’t bore you again with all the arguments.
Simply that they should have stared down the cameras in early June last year and said: “Men and women of Australia. You’ve been had. We simply can’t afford to go ahead with this shit.”
Oh, okay, words to that effect….just with more class and diplomacy.
A year and a half on, it’s suggested the Albanese government has lost some of its shine. If the latest Newspoll is repeated again or indeed if the two-party-preferred tightens further, a certain dullness will become obvious.
People are hurting out there now more than ever, and breaking a promises now – even one that still shouts to be broken for so many good reasons – might be the worse thing this government could do.
The bottom line is that these two dunces back in late-May, early June in 2022 were shit-scared of what this nation’s deplorable mainstream mediocre LNP publicists would do to them if they had shown some guts and fortitude and commitment to core ALP values way back when.
They’re giving no sign at the moment of growing any political cojones over the second half of what they are perhaps naively calling their” “first term”.
Don Gordon-Brown
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