Fired-up Albanese is still the class warfare kid
Readers who already feel defeated by the new year would be well within their rights to wonder just what exactly is the Prime Minister’s holiday recharge secret. On the first day of Parliament on Tuesday, Anthony Albanese seemed like something of a new man.
Gone (at least for now) was the sad sack Albo of old, who with his “I fight Tories” and “modest requests” always felt a little like a man auditioning for the part of Willy Loman in a community theatre production of Death Of A Salesman.
Instead, the Prime Minister’s first Question Time performance of 2024 was all fire and brimstone, taking it right up to Peter Dutton – at one stage comparing him to Jack Nicholson in The Shining, swinging an imaginary axe and yelling: “Here’s Peter!”
Of course, we all know why the PM is so fired up – quite simply, he thinks he’s on a winner with his revised Stage 3 tax cuts and that the Opposition’s position on the question is incoherent. Well, up to a point.
There is no doubt the Opposition looked briefly poleaxed by the new policy, allowing Team Albanese to brazen out charges that they broke a promise (who in politics doesn’t, they reason, and if everyone gets a few more bucks they’ll be forgiven).
There is also no doubt that Dutton is the victim of the ghost of Liberal leaders past, who put the cuts so far into the future they were all but guaranteed to be someone else’s problem.
But watching this newly confident and downright punchy Albanese, flying the banner of empathy and fighting for essential workers, it is hard not to see the cracks emerging.
Labor may think it is winning the politics of Stage 3 (the polls are thus far reserving judgment). But for Albanese the fundamental problem with his transformation is that it is built on a broken promise, even if it does “give every taxpayer a tax cut”.
Not only that, if the Prime Minister is trying to do his best Paul Keating, well, he is doing it by winding back rather than advancing real economic reform, by falling back on the politics of envy.
This is not, ultimately, solid ground from which to fight heading into an election season that is already beginning to come into focus.
This is also why the Opposition was keen to force the Prime Minister to commit to not taxing the family home or touch negative gearing.
On one hand, Albanese knows how much trouble Bill Shorten got into over franking credits in 2019 and does not want to repeat the mistake.
On the other, feeling like he got away first with tinkering with high value superannuation accounts and now tax cuts on the basis that it’s only “the wealthy” who lose anything, he must be very tempted to roll the dice again.
Is it possible that Labor might one day say, well, you can have the first (say) $2m of capital gains tax free, but after that you’re on the hook?
It is speculation but it would fit the government’s pattern of saying most people will still have a win while the well-off are forced to pay a bit more.
And this brings us back to where we started, to the Albo of old.
There was a flash of the Toryfighter in Tuesday’s question time, when the Prime Minister fired up about the subject of aspiration, saying that (fair enough) lower paid workers could be aspirational as well.
But buried in his peroration was the same old jabs about the Liberals and private schools.
There’s one more thing too. The Prime Minister was very keen to hammer the Coalition as being a mess, after having watched the ABC’s documentary about their years in power last week.
A newly confident Albanese should remember that Nemesis is exactly what happens when you show a bit too much hubris.