Sometimes I think that Sussan Ley and the Liberals’ big problem is that Labor has stolen their clothes. What the Liberals stood for in the good old days was minimum change. Only when changes could no longer be avoided were they made. The Libs’ big selling point was: “Vote for us to keep Labor out. Labor’s never happy unless it’s ‘reforming’ something.”
Well, not any more. Under the leadership of Anthony Albanese, Labor has lost its reforming zeal. It knows we have plenty of problems, and would like to do something about them, but not yet.
Albanese always has a reason for caution. Having lost the 2019 election against Scott Morrison that many thought it would win, Labor’s been in living in fear of that three-letter word “tax”.
Along with its policy to help first home buyers by restricting property investors’ use of negative gearing, Labor planned to help pay for its promises by making a small change to the “franking credits” that go to people who own shares.
Its Liberal opponents made this sound like Labor was planning an almighty tax grab, and Labor lost the election. Now that frightening three-letter word never passes its lips.
To ensure he won the 2022 election, Albanese made Labor a “small target”, promising to do a few nice things, but nothing nasty. The plan to fix negative gearing was gone, as was any threat to franking credits.
Once in power, Albanese discovered another reason for not doing anything someone mightn’t like. He’d won with a very narrow majority, so had to focus on consolidating Labor in power. This would set him up to really start fixing things in his second term.
With considerable help from the Liberals’ unpopular Peter Dutton, this strategy worked a treat at this year’s election. Labor won 94 seats in the lower house, the most seats any single party has ever won. And with a buffer of 18 seats, Albanese was now perfectly placed to get on with some controversial measures.
With the Liberals decimated and almost all the teal independents re-elected in the big-city seats they’d taken from the Libs, it was hard to see how Labor could lose the next election in 2028.
But no. Albanese had a new reason for proceeding with caution. With at least three terms almost guaranteed, he wants to steal the Libs’ status as the natural party of government.
If you can argue that the low risk of losing government in 2028 at last empowers Labor to make controversial reforms, you can just as easily argue it allows Labor to get away with doing as little as possible.
Labor much enjoys the big ministerial salaries and being driven around in big white cars. If you can enjoy the perks without doing the heavy lifting, why wouldn’t you? Albanese can’t think of a reason. He may have been a lefty firebrand when he entered parliament almost 30 years ago, but those embers have had a long time to cool.
These days, there’s no great ideological divide between Labor’s Left and Right factions. As one of the Left’s luminaries explained to me, these days they’re just rival management teams.
But the public doesn’t know that, and I have a theory that those from the Left faction who make it to the prime ministership – Albanese, and Julia Gillard before him – go to great lengths to demonstrate that they’re in no way left wing.
So what are the big problems Albanese isn’t game to get on with? Well, a big one is our contribution to global efforts to limit climate change by achieving net zero emissions of greenhouse gases by 2050 – and, since scientists’ modelling of how long we’ve got is proving optimistic, preferably much earlier.
The government keeps assuring us we’re “on track” to transition to renewable energy and achieve our commitment to reducing emissions by 43 per cent by 2030, but scientists aren’t so sure.
In any case, this month the government will need to announce our commitment for 2035, and anything less than a 75 per cent reduction will show a lack of resolve. By the same token, such a commitment won’t have much credibility without Labor having the courage to bring back an improved version of the carbon tax Gillard introduced in 2012 but that great statesman Tony Abbott abolished two years later.
As former competition boss Rod Sims has explained – and we experienced last time – the point of a carbon tax is to make building solar and wind farms more profitable relative to coal and gas, not to make people pay more tax. The proceeds of the tax would be used to compensate all but the high-earning taxpayers.
But Albanese and his troops have wrongly convinced themselves that Gillard’s carbon tax was the main reason the infighting rabble that was the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd government got tossed out in 2013 – which is why, in all the economic reform roundtable’s talk of tax reform, a carbon tax went conspicuously unmentioned.
The other big problem the government isn’t doing enough on is “intergenerational inequity” – the rough deal we’re giving our younger adults. You see this most clearly in the difficulty young people have affording a home of their own.
To be fair, the Albanese government has been working with the states to increase the supply of homes in the parts of our big cities where people most want to live, although we’re yet to see much progress.
But as well as seeking to increase the supply of homes, Albanese should also help by reducing the demand for the kind of places first home owners buy from better-off, negatively geared investors. These days, however, all mention of negative gearing is verboten.
And that’s before you get to the awkward truth that a young to middle-aged worker pays far more income tax on the same income than if it’s earned by a retiree with loads of superannuation or other investment income.
Speaking of retirement, that’s what Albanese should do if he wants to run a government but can’t bring himself to govern. No shame in being past it.
