Focus on broken promise overlooks the real cruelty |
There has been a lot said about trust and honesty in politics in the days since Labor handed down its budget, but not a lot has had to do with integrity.
The focus has been on Labor’s broken promise about changing negative gearing or the capital gains tax discount, which was secured by journalists at the last election campaign.
In the past couple of weeks, Labor’s own research and polling showed people expected structural changes to make the housing market more fairer.
Under pressure on multiple fronts – rising inflation and, with it, rising anger and turns to One Nation, Jim Chalmers won one of his long-held reform wishes.
Labor isn’t angry about the focus on broken promises, and spent the days after it decided to make the changes workshopping answers and explanations; own it (at least in part, but don’t say broken promise), empathise making a right decision even if it’s hard, and point to the generational inequality.
If pushed, reference other, positive broken promises – like changed minds on stage-three tax cuts and halving the fuel excise.
So far, all has gone to script. Labor is having a fight where it feels it holds the higher ground, and there has been less attention on the parts of the budget that are not as fair – the devastating cuts to the NDIS, cuts to foreign aid funding, climate technologies, and the lack of support for people on benefits or low incomes.
It feels on firmer ground after Angus Taylor’s dogwhistling budget-in-reply speech. Taylor went back to the Fraser government’s first budget after the Gough Whitlam defeat, when then-treasurer Philip Lynch handed down a May 1976 budget that included personal income tax indexation, which he said “would produce a desirable discipline on future government spending decisions”.
Lynch offset the measure by abolishing tax rebates for children and putting a levy on Medicare. In August 1976, he referred to it as “perhaps the most........