“Would the people in the cheaper seats clap your hands. And the rest of you, if you’ll just rattle your jewellery.” John Lennon
I don’t think anyone serious ever doubted that the Stage 3 tax package needed to be amended if the Labor Government of Anthony Albanese were ever going to be taken remotely seriously as a Labor government. The prime minister loves to repeat the story of his humble beginnings to signal his commitment to the bottom end of town, but the retention of tax reform that overwhelming favoured the top end was making him look distinctly like someone who was pulling the ladder up behind him.
The pressure brought to bear by ordinary voters through social media, and the hints provided by polling and election results in outer suburbs, along with careful argument and lobbying by organisations like The Australia Institute and Per Capita eventually dragged Labor, kicking and screaming, to the right decision.
Something had to give, and the wonder of it is that it took so long.
Actually, there is no wonder in it at all. It is depressingly familiar, a kind of ritualistic torture we all had to go through, a microcosm of a particular type of Australian politics.
A Labor opposition gets sucked into supporting the worst sort of Coalition policy—designed precisely to suck them in—in pursuit of a “small-target” election strategy. They crawl into government, convince themselves it was the genius of their strategy that got them there, and then wring their hands for months on end about daring to do anything that might upset the delicate forces they are certain contributed to their gossamer-thin majority.
All of this is played out against the background of the myth of News Corp, the whole political class acting like it is still 1950 and that the Murdoch mastheads can make or break governments at will. So Labor, learning all the wrong lessons from their defeat in 2019, front up to pay obeisance to the moguls, brush off calls for media inquiries, giving who-knows-what-other assurances, and spend the first half of their first term back in government running a ridiculous do-nothing approach to power, while convincing themselves, and many in the political class, they are in fact engaged in some brilliant reinvention of political management.
Those who point out the problems with this approach are dutifully chided as radicals, amateurs, unserious or whatever other dismissive term can be conjured, while the chiders will now seamlessly shift to explaining how this was the plan all along.
The process speaks to the rut most political commentary—most politics—is stuck in, an executive-driven malaise of received wisdom and a loss of touch with ordinary voters.
The idea of “the broken promise” is the final act, one of the key kabuki tropes of the same politics, an invention of precisely the sort of infantilising media practices that has brought the institution into the disrepute it currently enjoys. Instead of addressing themselves to the genuine needs of government—of making the fucking country a better place for the majority of ordinary souls who live here—and approaching policy as something that is endlessly complicated and that needs to be revisited, rethought, and rejigged from time to time, the media reduce the matter to a game of but you said!
We then have weeks of very serious journalists patting themselves on the back for “holding the government to account” for asking endless questions like how we can trust you anymore? Or, don’t you think you should apologise to the Australian people? Everyone plays their role, reads from the script, and the illusion of rigorous democratic engagement is maintained.
It’s not that being able to trust what politicians say doesn’t matter; it is that when they do break a promise—as Albanese obviously has—the issue isn’t just the broken promise, but whether we are capable of judging their actions in a grown-up manner or whether we just stand there and stamp our feet like five-year-olds.
Hmmm.
Anyway, we got there in the end and, as far as it goes it is a very welcome change, but sheesh.1
The point I want to make about all this is precisely the point I have been making since Labor were elected on 21 May 2022, that our politics has changed and the usual presumptions on which the behaviour of the political class rests can no longer be relied upon. And that given this, there is a huge opportunity for Labor and others to tilt mainstream politics in a more progressive direction, whatever is happening in the rest of the world.
Let’s look at what has happened since Labor rejigged the Stage 3 tax cuts.
Having been gifted the free space of Albanese’s incrementalism for eighteen months into which they could inject any nonsense they saw fit—from boycotting Woolworths to endless friendly media stories explaining to us that Peter Dutton really isn’t a monster—the Coalition is suddenly being forced to deal with an actual issue. They have fallen in a heap almost immediately.
Deputy Opposition leader, Sussan Ley, promised that a reelected Coalition would repeal Labor’s changes and “support the existing stage-three arrangements”. Then she changed her story:
Ley was asked on Sky on Wednesday whether if the Coalition wins the election it will “roll back whatever changes are made”.
Ley replied: “Well this is our position. This is absolutely our position and the point is … it was Labor’s position too.”
…On Thursday Chalmers accused the Coalition of playing the “usual mindless, nasty, negative politics” …
“Their policy is to go to the election to jack up taxes on middle Australia in order to pay for an even bigger tax cut for people on high incomes, Sussan Ley has made that clear,” he told ABC TV.
Ley clarified her position on Thursday. “I did not say that we will roll back Labor’s new proposal,” Ley told Radio National. “I said we support the existing stage-three arrangements and we would assess the new proposal.
Nationals’ leader David Littletobeproudof muttered some nonsense about people on around 200K a year not really being that well off, another favourite right-wing trope, easily dismissed by, you know, facts.
Bridget McKenzie, the opposition spokesperson on infrastructure, declared that the changes to the Stage 3 tax reforms were “about bribing the voters in Dunkley,” while Peter Dutton himself was sternly saying that “I’d say to the people of Dunkley and the broader Australian people: if this prime minister is prepared to look at your neighbour in the eye and lie to him or her, you are next,” he said.
Wut?
I don’t think it can be a sneaky ploy to get votes in a given electorate and an indication he will lose votes in that same electorate. Dutton also said that the PM’s leadership was “dead, buried, cremated”, which is an interesting funereal sequence and the sort of gasping for air that comes when you can feel the oxygen leaving the room you have been standing in.
Dutton is flailing, and his ill-considered tweet this week about Guardian journalist Katharine Murphy taking a job in Albanese’s office was further evidence of this. It was certainly not an indication of someone in control of their public messaging, as well as being a telling glimpse into the fevered, conspiratorial insiders-and-outsiders world Dutton lives in.
Next, employer groups decided to take advantage of the Stage 3 moment and run the line that the tax cuts for lower-waged sectors should be factored into any wage rises that might be in the offing, and the shameless, self-interest and opportunism of this suggestion was something to behold. I can’t help but agree with Rachel Withers:
It is also worth noting the reaction from the community independents this week.
They tried hard to walk the line between expressing disappointment about the broken promise, while acknowledging, not only that change was necessary, but that many within their communities actually support the changes announced by the government. Still, the balancing act has brought out some of the inherent contradictions/problems in the way the community independents position themselves more generally, anomalies I wrote about at some length in Voices of Us.
Zali Steggall, Sophie Scamps and Allegra Spender have all tried to argue that some in their electorates, in Spender’s words, “were relying on this tax change to meet significant rental increases, mortgage increases and other significant expenses,” and that that she didn’t think “the government has properly acknowledged those people who will be negatively affected and were relying on this change.”
This may have some efficacy as an illustration of people not being able to trust what politicians say, but as an economic argument, it is weak sauce.
Steggall’s further comment that “I overwhelmingly feel this is a decision by the prime minister and the treasurer that is politically motivated in relation to maybe the byelection of Dunkley and also outer suburban seats,” goes to the heart of the basic class interests that still drive the self-described “centrists” of the leafy suburbs.
Read from the other side of the class divide, it makes perfect sense for a prime minister—a Labor prime minister in particular—to enact reform that benefits the less-well off in outer suburban areas and thank heavens he did. Politically motivated just means politics, and Steggall is every bit as politically motivated here as she is accusing Albanese of being.
Steggall also made the point that the decision to rejig Stage 3 didn’t come out of nowhere, that the package was months in the making, and that therefore “there has been numerous opportunities for the Prime Minister and the Treasurer to not lie to the Australian people – to actually bring the Australian people into their confidence.”
Now, I have often made the case for politicians bringing voters into their confidence, and so I applaud Steggall’s instincts here. I would further add that, even if the government didn’t take the public into their confidence, then Albanese should at least have confided in the crossbench or given them some sort of heads up about what he had planned. It was a perfect opportunity to move beyond the two-party mindset and set up a new governing modus operandi.
Regardless, this is strong language from Steggall, saying outright that Labor lied, and I wonder if she isn’t making a rod for her own back. It may well be that she and the other independents will have to decide who to support in minority government after the next election—and the terms on which they will make that decision—and one wonders whether we’ll be taken into her confidence as she and the rest of the crossbench thrash out the arguments.
It will be interesting to see.
Anyway, I’m not saying there aren’t negatives in all this for Labor, but it is extraordinary how these relatively modest changes to the tax package—which have loomed so large in the life of this government, as an existential threat—have thrown the Opposition into disarray.
It’s not just the nonsense headlines like those I highlighted above: it is the way in which they have shifted from any defence of the original Stage 3 tax package to directing our attention to other alleged problems. In other words, they are not even trying to defend the original Morrison tax package, about as clear a win for Labor as you could imagine.
By calling their bluff on Stage 3, Labor has changed the conversation and now, apparently, the thing we should be worried about is that having won this argument—which the papers are all-but conceding—Labor might dare to do some other Labor-y things. Paul “Revere” Kelly sprang into action, warning us that the class enemy is coming.
He was manfully supported by PVO.
Biting stuff from down there on the canvas.
And God, if only.
If only Labor would learn the lesson that there are fights they can win and win easily if they would only try; that the anti-Labor forces in this country, especially the rightwing media and His Majesty’s opposition, ain’t what they used to be, that they are little more than cardboard cutouts who can successfully be challenged if Labor commit themselves to genuine democratic reform. If only Labor could be convinced that there are a lot of people out there who decades of “reform” have left worse off and who are desperate for someone to take their side and then take their side on every other policy matter.
This is me not holding my breath.
Not to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory or anything, but even if these are welcome reforms—they are!—they are still a concession to the sort of low-tax mentality that has undermined public services and increased inequality in this country, and will ultimately make it harder to enact more meaningful reforms down the track.
And this is me repeating what I’ve been saying for a while.
In contemporary politics, the media landscape means there is no real way to centralise a political message anymore, while party loyalty is a thing of the past. The idea of mandates and agenda setting have never meant less, and in the absence of meaningful engagement, progressive politics is vulnerable to right wing populism. What there is still room for, though, is a politics that pitches itself at the two-thirds of the population who just want to live in a world where housing, education, healthcare, retirement—food! —are not just things available to the well-off.
If Labor curl back up into a ball and roll into a corner again, Dutton and co. will happily fill the vacated space with their various culture war campaigns—it’s all they have—and I’m sure you are sick to death of hearing about the tactic of flooding the zone with shit. Me too. At least what this week has shown is that the best defence against such flooding is a levee made of good, solid policy.
We now need to build it higher.
First published by Tim Dunlop in The Future of Everything Substack January 31, 2024
Tim Dunlop
I am an independent, Melbourne-based writer specialising in media, politics, technology, and the future of work. My books, and my work here, is an ongoing argument with the status quo.