Labor bets it all on the money, not on the vow
There is a saying that money talks and bullshit walks – the only thing that can be believed is what you put on the table, not what you say. And that is what is most extraordinary about the PM’s Olympian tax backflip – he has put more dollars in the pockets of more taxpayers at the expense of his standing as a man of his word.
It is a crazy brave bargain. Often we demand politicians put their money where their mouths are. Anthony Albanese has put money where his mouth was not.
And so if we assume the old axiom to be true, this produces a new confounding conundrum: What happens to the leader who delivers both money and bullshit?
Certainly voters will happily take the cash. The question is whether they will also punish the bollocks – trouser Labor’s new tax cuts but then vote for the Coalition, which will almost certainly have to match them.
Thus the government’s clever wedge may end up being too smart by half. By forcing the Liberals to back their backflip, they give voters the option of both keeping the cash and punishing them for the broken promise. A win for Labor thus becomes a win-win for the Coalition.
We have seen this playbook before. At the 2007 election, John Howard dropped the mother of all tax cuts.
Labor’s solution was to simply match them – with the token proviso of shaving the top beneficiaries from $200,000 to $180,000. No doubt we will see a repeat of this.
Peter Dutton is politically bound to wave in the new cuts but will have to add more on the higher end to maintain credibility on tackling bracket creep. This exposes grave risks for both sides.
Labor will have to combat a ruthless character assassination in which the PM and Treasurer are relentlessly painted as liars while the Coalition is, a touch paradoxically, offering all its goodies and more. However, Liberal claims of responsible economic management will come under siege by Labor. And so how does all this play out? The critical test will, of course, be next month’s by-election in Dunkley, a swing seat based around Frankston.
It was one of the outer suburban “Howard battler” seats but these days sits with Labor on a margin of a bit over 6 per cent. The average swing against a sitting government in a byelection is generally about 5 per cent – though the result in Aston last year turned such rules of thumb on their head.
Even so, this is a must-win for Labor. The result in Aston and Albanese’s sky-high approval numbers for the first 12 months of his prime ministership created the impression that he had come to power in a landslide.
In fact Labor’s majority is wafer thin and includes a rather odd pastiche of seats that traditionally would never be theirs, such as Tangney in Western Australia and Higgins in Victoria. These wealthier seats will be harder hit by the tax changes, and if it cannot hold a seat like Dunkley that will benefit, then what is the point of it all?
And for those comparing the tax changes to Howard’s GST reforms that he took to the polls, it is worth noting that Howard had a doubledigit majority and lost almost all of it in 1998. Albo has a margin he can count on the fingers of one hand.
Dunkley is thus not just a seat the PM has to win for its own sake but it is a kind of bellwether for how mainstream Australia will react to this volatile political cocktail of a big broken promise and a bagful of cash.
And so do we care more about what comes out of politicians’ mouths or what goes into their wallets?
According to this week’s Newspoll, voters think Albo has done the right thing by a factor of two to one, and Labor is still sitting at a healthy 52-48 two-party preferred. Its primary vote even ticked up.
Put your money on the money every time.