3 months ago
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Treasurer Jim Chalmers has tapped the brakes on Labor’s reform summit, a day after Anthony Albanese talked down its significance.
In quiet talks in Parliament this week, the government has been sending a clear message: excited observers should curb their enthusiasm.
Anthony Albanese on Monday emphasised that it was cabinet, not the looming roundtable, that set the direction of government policy.Credit: Dominic Lorrimer
Cabinet had become concerned about the huge expectations being attached to this month’s three-day roundtable, including that it could lead to major tax changes that economists argue may be good for the country but might frighten voters.
When unions unveiled a demand for Bill Shorten-era wealth taxes on Sunday, several government sources said it added to a sense in Labor that Chalmers needed to erect guard rails for what has been positioned as the launchpad for a tranche of bold policies to kickstart the economy.
According to three well-placed Labor sources, the idea for a roundtable came from the prime minister and his office. Albanese first raised the idea in a meeting with the Business Council of Australia in February, one source said.
Chalmers took the idea up with gusto. From the day after the May 3 election in an ABC Insiders interview, the treasurer was talking about how the government “will do more” on reform.
He naturally became the point-person for the gabfest and opened the door to a wider debate, particularly on tax, than Albanese had planned.
The prime minister, sometimes blunt with his frustrations, let his views be known on Monday as the drumbeat of speculation about the summit jarred with his focus on delivering popular and less contentious election policies.
“To be very clear, it’s not a meeting of the cabinet. We just had one of those,” Albanese said.
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“It’s a meeting in the cabinet room. And I expect that there’ll be a whole range of views put forward, much of which is contradictory with each other.”
It is now expected that the summit will produce a handful of policies to which Chalmers will immediately commit. Speedier approvals for energy projects, cutting red tape, and new incentives for home building, are seen as quick wins with wide support from warring unions and business lobbies.
Bigger changes that gain support from assorted experts, captains of industry and unions will be a put off for further examination. More items will be placed in the latter category than the former.
In other words: don’t expect a big bang process that radically alters the course of the government. Calm and steady is the Albanese mantra.
Narrowing the summit’s scope will frustrate economists desperate for Chalmers to emulate Keating, his PhD subject, by enacting a suite of major reforms to fix Australia’s productivity malaise rather than tinkering at the edges.
Albanese wears some of the blame for lobbing up an idea without making clear its contours. Yet, his establishment of the summit cuts across the narrative that Chalmers, like Peter Costello and Paul Keating before him, is solely pressuring a more cautious prime minister into action.
Equally, the debate got too big on the government during the weeks when Chalmers was the point person for publicly defining the problem Labor wanted to solve. And it was Chalmers who at the National Press Club in June said, “No sensible progress can be made on productivity ... without proper consideration of more tax reform.”
Optimists in the government, however, caution against the suggestion that the roundtable will fail unless Chalmers comes out of it with a shopping list for express approval by his cabinet colleagues.
It has been years since the country had a long debate on important economic ideas without constant political point scoring, they say.
And if the summit can create a mandate for Labor to tackle harder policies later in its term, on top of low-hanging fruit it can execute more quickly, it might achieve more than it initially appears.
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