Oz the great and powerful
This is how it works. On Wednesday last week, The Australian leads with a story warning Jim Chalmers not to drop the stage three tax cuts. The paper says Chalmers faces
“a Labor split” if he makes changes to the “already legislated” cuts.
The next day, The Australian leads with a version of the same story: “Millions to pay cost of tax reversal”. The paper’s own analysis claims 2.5 million “middle-income” Australians would be worse off without the cuts.
It quotes an unnamed government source calling any decision on the cuts a “shit sandwich”. It says a significant number of the right faction is against changes, and names the same three people it did the day before.
On Friday, the story is still on page one. The first par sounds a note of caution: “Anthony Albanese looks set to gain the support of parliament if he amends the stagethree tax cuts but faces growing pressure inside the government to avoid repeating Julia Gillard’s broken carbon tax promise.”
On Saturday, the story leads the paper again. The piece warns that pay rises will “go if tax cut gets the axe”. It says this reveals the “cost of dumping stage three”. Again, the analysis is done by the paper itself: “Middleincome Australians would be forced to hand back about 50 per cent of any pay rises earned over the next two years through higher taxes and ‘incentive killer’ bracket creep if
Labor opts to scrap the stage-three tax cuts scheduled for 2024-25.”
On Monday, The Australian leads with the story it has been meaning to write all along: “Labor blinks in tax battle. Changes to stage-three cuts on hold.” The piece continues: “Facing a political backlash over any move to trim tax cuts from middleto-high income earners five months after promising voters that Labor would stick with the legislated stage three package, Anthony Albanese on Sunday repeatedly said: ‘Our position hasn’t changed.’”
It was all over in five days, one-fifth the life span of a housefly. Labor is locked into a policy Scott Morrison never believed would be legislated, let alone delivered. There is no economic logic behind it. The income tax curve on which it was based was drawn on a napkin in 1974. It has proved in the years since to be little more than a dirty picture, sketched out to entertain three men in a bar. One was Arthur Laffer and the other two were Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.
The story here is not just about the grasping dreams of neoliberalism. It is about the feral power of a newspaper such as The
Australian. This power is almost wholly imagined but that doesn’t make it any less real. The people who do the imagining are the same ones who make decisions.
In the midst of its success on tax cuts, The Australian has launched another campaign, this time against the Indigenous Voice to Parliament. The paper is putting it on page one every day. Presumably its readers don’t notice the repetition. Perhaps it’s comforting to have the routine.
No doubt Labor is watching this, too. The reforms the country needs line up almost exactly with the ones The Australian rejects. The perversity of this is infuriating.
Sometimes it helps to remember that at the end of The Wizard of Oz the curtain is pulled back to show a little man with a microphone, not unlike Rupert Murdoch in stature and appearance. He makes promises but doesn’t help anyone to get home. By now it feels as if the country should have realised this is also the story of The Australian. For as long as people like Anthony Albanese keep reading it, however, we won’t – and the country will remain too much like the rest of the cast: brainless, heartless and cowardly.•