OPINION
As I wrote in the closing days of last year, the summer parliamentary break couldn’t come faster for Australian PM Anthony Albanese. Fresh from a potentially fatal referendum hiding, Albanese was left fiddling while Australia burned in a bonfire of antisemitism lit by the far-left Greens and Labor’s own vital voting bloc, Muslim Western Sydney.
Albanese desperately needs a circuit breaker to even hope to keep his political fortunes alive. Clearly, he thinks he’s found it: breaking a key promise in order to funnel billions into the ever-grasping hands of the leaner class.
The Prime Minister has broken a repeated promise in order to salvage his declining electoral fortunes. It is a resort to old old-fashioned, class war redistribution by turning the stage three tax cuts into a political contest with the Coalition.
The question is, of course, whether voters are prepared to trouser the cash and forget the broken promise – something that, over the last decade, Australians have been less and less inclined to do.
Albanese has no mandate for this tax change revamp. He is doing what he pledged not to do. His message to the Australian public is: pocket your money and forget my breach of trust – you are all the winners. The road to this fractured promise is paved with good intentions – easing cost-of-living pressures for about 12 million Australian taxpayers.
That’s important. Australians will be grateful for the extra tax break. But a distrustful electorate will distrust Albanese even more. Gratitude and distrust – they sound contradictory but they are tied together in this betrayal. For Albanese, it is the biggest gamble of his prime ministership, because it goes to his judgment about the Australian people.
As we saw with the Voice referendum, that judgment is severely lacking.
The tactical geniuses that were convinced the voice referendum would pass have made their follow-up tactical call: that larger tax breaks for low and middle-income earners will resurrect Labor’s electoral fortunes.
On the other hand, those same voters will still be reminded, every day, that the cost-of-living crisis is far from going away. In fact, it’s getting worse. It’s there every time Australians get hit with another spiralling power bill, are smashed with rising mortgage repayments and rents and hit with ever-more gargantuan grocery bills.
All of these are the direct result of government policies, from “Net Zero” to mass immigration.
Albanese is also playing to, not aspirational middle Australia, but his own, dwindling voter base.
The big winners are nurses, truckies, teachers and aged care, welfare and disability workers while the losers are executives, white-collar professionals, miners and IT specialists.
The Australian
Note how many of those winners are already on the government payroll.
And tradies will be joining the loser column over the next few years, thanks to bracket creep.
More than a million workers Anthony Albanese says will be better off under his stage three tax rewrite will be worse off over the next decade, prompting accusations the Labor government is more focused on its immediate political position than long-term reform that will benefit Middle Australia.
The Australian
And when those workers receive their tax return, the pie chart on the back, showing where their tax money is spent, will show an ever-growing slice marked “Welfare”.
The independent senator David Pocock has called on the Albanese government to use $28bn of savings from its new tax-cuts package to increase welfare payments and urged Labor to trim other tax concessions.
With the Greens signalling that they will press Labor to recoup even more from high-income earners, Pocock has suggested the revamp of stage three should be a springboard to other tax reforms in the too-hard basket including capital gains tax.
The Guardian
With Labor dancing ever-harder to the crack of the Green whip, who seriously doubts the Greens and Teals will get what they want?
Albanese won’t admit his spectacular broken promise – despite being elected as PM pledging to restore integrity after the Morrison government. This claim is now in ruins. Albanese tied his integrity to the stage three tax cuts with varying formulas: “My word is my bond – I’ve always been a man of my word.”
The Australian
But that, of course, was all before the referendum loss and the upcoming Dunkley by-election, which Labor has to not just win, but win convincingly (it is, after all, the safest of safe Labor seats), if Albanese is to have any hope of keeping his job.