Albo runs risk of a big shock with stray voltage
ANTHONY Albanese said a curious thing on Tuesday morning. Speaking to a group of business leaders in Sydney, the Prime Minister accused the Coalition of being addicted to what he called “the pathology of political conflict”.
On the surface it seems like just the sort of line you’d expect from any prime minister talking about his or her opponents.
You know, a bit of “we’re good, they’re bad” partisanship all tied up neatly with a speechwriter’s alliterative flourish. But dive deeper into the politics of the past few weeks and it turns out the opposite is true.
The government isn’t trying to avoid conflict. Instead, it is actively relishing it, using the cover of battle to prosecute and implement its agenda to remake Australia in its own image. It’s all part of something called “stray voltage theory”, which is a phenomenon described by Steve Krakauer, an American former journalist and media executive, in a new book, about the way politics and the press work in the US, called Uncovered.
The idea was first developed by strategists working for Barack Obama, another leader who wanted to “fundamentally transform” his country. Basically, the idea is this: “Controversy sparks attention, attention provokes conversation and conversation embeds previously unknown or marginalised ideas in the public consciousness.”
Those once-marginalised ideas are the “stray voltage”.
And according to Krakauer the more the White House (or in this case, the PM’s office) seems on the surface to be “defensive, besieged or off-guard”, the more of these sparks can wind up floating around to be used by a canny government for its own long-term advantage.
This sounds awfully similar to how the debate over tax Australians have just witnessed has played out.
Recall that the initial controversy started with Jim Chalmers floating all sorts of ideas about using Australians’ superannuation savings to fund everything from renewable energy schemes to affordable housing.
Then, in the end, the government managed to stick a landing with a policy that seemed much more modest (even if it broke a campaign promise) and which polls showed a majority of Australians were willing to stomach.
That idea, that some people have too much super and need to be taxed accordingly, was only some of the stray voltage which was loosed by a fight that on the surface seemed to have the PM and his team in disarray.
Yes, the PM appeared to comprehensively shoot down the idea of subjecting the family home to capital gains taxes after Chalmers badly bobbled it. But once said, it could not be unsaid. This too became stray voltage. And there’s more.
The government went to the election on a promise to not touch Stage 3 tax cuts but there is plenty of stray voltage around that too.
Particularly because once you start describing people keeping the money they’ve earnt as a “concession” in an era of high debt and no appetite for spending cuts, it can be hard to quit.
But perhaps the biggest source of this stray voltage can be found in Treasury’s Tax Expenditures and Insights Statement, released last month at the height of the super controversy. Under the heading “revenue foregone”, Treasury suggests capital gains relief on the family home is “costing” the government $26 billion a year.
Rental deductions (think negative gearing) “costs” another $24.4 billion.
Work-related expenses are another $10 billion.
And on and on it goes. Given the fact that after all the back and forth over superannuation, voters ultimately gave hitting superannuation balances of more than $3 million with higher taxes the tick, the government will be sorely tempted to press its hand. For Peter Dutton and the Coalition, this presents a real challenge.
The Opposition quite rightly sees Labor’s program as redistributionist but having the fight on those terms just creates more sparks for Albanese and Chalmers to leverage class warfare using code words like “fairness” and “equity”.
Australia may have a deeply aspirational streak that is still maintained and stoked in working class electorates that may wind up being the Liberals’ future. But the fact is the country has never entirely shed its tall poppy instincts either.
To counter this, Dutton will need to not just fight for the rights of everyone to keep as much as possible of what they earn but challenge Labor to abandon its Whitlam streak and return to its later reformist ethos which held that when individuals succeed, so too does Australia.