It’s too early to predict the outcome of the election – notwithstanding the swing back to Labor reported by recent published polls. Anything could happen to change voting intentions in the last weeks of the campaign.
But it’s not too early to mark when, for the players and insiders, the current turnaround in political fortunes occurred – which was a month or two before it was picked up in the polls.
This was when Peter Dutton announced a new policy (one of the few at that time) and Labor responded to it with a gusto that ignited proceedings in Question Time in the House of Representatives and dramatically changed the mood of MPs on both government and Opposition benches.
The policy announcement, made on 19 January, was that “A Dutton Coalition Government will cut red tape for small businesses by introducing a capped tax deduction of $20,000 for business-related meal and entertainment expenses”.
There wasn’t much reaction at the time, though we subsequently learned that it prompted the treasurer to get his department to see how much such a scheme would cost – not precisely the same scheme, because Treasury isn’t supposed to get involved in checking Opposition policies at that time. Also, there wasn’t a lot of precision in what the Opposition was proposing.
As it happened, Treasury came up with a daunting range of possibilities, minimum cost $1.6 billion, maximum $10 billion if every eligible business made maximum use of the entitlement.
The Treasury estimates came just in time for the first day of the 2025 parliamentary sitting. Happenstance, no doubt.
And the prime minister was the one who had first shot at the policy.
Question Time was kicked off by Dutton asking a question that encapsulated the Opposition’s attack on the government’s financial record.
“My question is to the prime minister. Under this weak Albanese Labor Government, interest rates have increased 12 times, energy bills have risen by $1000, living standards have collapsed, 27,000 business have gone insolvent and we’re in a record-breaking household recession. Will the prime minister now apologise for promising Australians they would be better off and admit that they can’t afford another three years of this weak Albanese Labor Government?”
Albanese began by quoting a range of figures that he and other ministers have been using for months to answer all questions about the economy:
“When we came to office, real incomes were going backwards, inflation was going up, rising — it had a six in front of it — and indeed we had people’s living standards going backwards. And we had deficits — a $78 billion deficit — that we inherited in the March 2022 budget. Let’s go through the figures of then and now that are raised by the leader of the Opposition. Inflation in that March 2022 quarter was 2.1%. In the quarter that has just passed, headline was 0.2 and underlying was 0.5. Inflation was 2.4% on an annual basis, under the two-to-three range that the RBA aimed for – in the bottom half of that range. That was achieved without seeing the massive spike in unemployment that we have seen in comparable economies”.
And on and on.
As his time to answer was about to run out he added a final paragraph referring to Opposition policies which concluded:
“We now know that they’ve come up with a cost-of-living plan, but it’s just not for workers. It’s that workers should pay for some of their mates to have lunch.”
The next question, a Dorothy Dixer from a government backbencher, was to the treasurer and was also about the economy and about “any other approaches”. Chalmers gave his standard reply about what the government had done to improve the economy and then added this:
“All we’ve got from them is lower wages for workers and longer lunches for bosses, with the taxpayers to foot the bill. He wants workers to pay for bosses’ lunches, and he will smash the budget in the process. This is the only kind of policy that could have been agreed at the tail end of a very long lunch. You can imagine them sitting around, with the blue teeth and the soy sauce on the tie and coming up with the big ideas. Either they didn’t know how much it cost when they announced the policy or they didn’t want Australians to know. They have refused to come clean on the cost of their long-lunch policy or what they will cut to pay for that policy.”
The Opposition’s response, in a question from shadow treasurer Angus Taylor, was to ask: “Treasurer, unlike small businesses, big businesses like Coles, Woolworths and Qantas can cater in-house, in their corporate boardrooms, and do so as a tax deduction. How much does this cost the budget?”
The treasurer replied in part:
“… only the Liberal and National parties could see taxpayers and workers funding between $1.6 billion and $10 billion to shout their bosses lunch as an issue of fairness. Only those opposite could see that as an issue of social justice and an issue of fairness.”
Uproar followed with innumerable points of order taken by the Opposition. These could not disguise the unease on the Opposition backbenches and the triumphalism on the Labor side.
What happens in Question Time normally doesn’t matter very much. It is theatre, with well-rehearsed lines delivered to a minute audience of people generally committed to one side or the other. But occasionally what happens makes a significant difference to morale, boosting confidence on one side, leaving the other dispirited. And that impacts on the way MPs and their supporters campaign. Confidence is an important element that impacts on some voters.
So far as I can tell from the mainstream media, the tax break for small business lunches policy has disappeared without a trace. Though it wouldn’t be surprising if it was revived closer to the election – not by the Liberals, but by Labor seeking to embarrass Dutton.
David Solomon is a former legal and political correspondent. He has degrees in Arts and Law and a Doctorate of Letters. He was Queensland Integrity Commissioner 2009-2014.