Albanese now has time to bring real change. So timing becomes critical

3 months ago 19

In the first session of question time this term, Anthony Albanese was asked whether the government was considering certain taxes. A small smile appeared briefly on the prime minister’s face as he stepped up to deliver his answer. Then it vanished and he delivered his line, quiet and clear: “I’ll give a big tip to the member for Fairfax: the time to run a scare campaign is just before an election, not after one.”

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese looks confident in the Parliament on Thursday.

It was a good line. The quiet confidence with which it was delivered left no doubt as to the government’s ascendancy. It helped that, as others have noted, Albanese was right. The opposition’s attempts to warn of new taxes fell flat. Most voters have just made their decision – based in part on what the government said it would do – and they aren’t yet interested in speculations as to what it might do.

But Albanese’s words contain a lesson for the government too. The prime minister was talking about a specific type of scare campaign – the rule-in-rule-out kind – where the subject is imagined dangers. But the lesson applies to scare campaigns of any stripe, including those about the impact of actual policies. A scare campaign won’t work for a while now. This raises a question: what is the optimal timing in which the government might announce significant reform and make the case for it, safe in the knowledge that apocalyptic warnings will fall on deaf ears?

A clue as to the government’s thinking might lie in the lessons of its first term. Most prime ministers get into habits. They find things that work and repeat them. The first year of the Albanese government was about setting a tone by delivering on election promises. That is what Albanese has said about the first year of this term, too. Most of the last year was about getting election-ready: troublesome policies sidelined, retail politics to the fore. No doubt that will be repeated.

This leaves the difficult middle: the period in which the trickiest feats were attempted. That second year was dominated by the campaign for the Indigenous voice to parliament and then by Albanese’s decision to break a promise and change Scott Morrison’s stage 3 tax cuts.

The fact those feats were attempted in the second year meant two things. First, that if the political impacts were bad for the government – frustration at a referendum loss, anger at a broken promise – there was another year in which those feelings might fade. (Though criticism of the government at the weekend’s Garma Festival reminds us that the real impacts of the referendum loss will be felt for years; political impact is not the same thing as actual impact.)

Just as significant was the fact that Albanese waited. For the tax cuts, this meant that the pressure built. Withstanding such pressure can be difficult, but it can also be immensely helpful: by the time a government acts, it can feel almost inevitable.

Then there was a final element of timing. The debate over those tax cuts had been going on for years before Albanese was elected. Pressure for change had been building all that time, not just for the period Labor was in government.

Labor’s shift on those tax cuts should remind us that political matters are never settled permanently. There is a proud heritage of politicians picking up ideas that were defeated once and trying them again in different circumstances. Think how remarkable it is that John Howard took a GST to the 1998 election – just five years after John Hewson lost the “unlosable election” on the same issue.

Of course, there was a difference: Howard was in government while Hewson was in opposition. A little like, say, if Albanese chose now to alter negative gearing and capital gains tax, even though Bill Shorten lost on those issues in 2019.

Or take Medicare, which Albanese spoke about so much during the campaign. In its first iteration – Gough Whitlam’s Medibank – it attracted significant opposition before being dismantled by the Fraser government. It was resurrected as Medicare by the Hawke government.

It is interesting, then, to watch recent debate about another controversial policy enacted in a Labor government’s turbulent second term only to be torn down by the Coalition. More and more, we are hearing calls for the return of a carbon price.

I’m shocked at how often the inaccurate claim is made that there has been no significant tax reform in recent decades. Julia Gillard’s carbon price was exactly that: taxing pollution while cutting income tax. Then again, it should not be a surprise that the political class likes to forget this, considering how much of it was involved in destroying it: swathes of the media and a significant chunk of the business lobby. A few weeks ago, former Treasury boss Ken Henry said, “Why the hell did we ever drop it? That’s the question.” We know the answer: short-sighted self-interest and a shallow public debate (plus Labor chaos and Tony Abbott).

This still-quite-recent history makes the government’s desire for consensus at its reform roundtable seem optimistic. Two weeks ago, Albanese told The Australian: “If you had a choice between, do you have less things with more support, or more things with less broad support, then I’m in favour of the former.” How many genuinely significant changes can we expect out of this process?

Some notes on timing and expectations then. The government should probably not expect consensus: not on anything that really counts. That means any big shifts are probably a while away, in keeping with Labor’s first term: probably in the second year. Finally, the government should keep in mind that on some topics – mining taxes, carbon taxes and housing taxes – the pressure has been building for years. Some may never happen. But for others, it might be just about getting the timing right.

Sean Kelly is the author of The Game: A Portrait of Scott Morrison, a regular columnist and a former adviser to Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd.