Shorten’s cunning stunt

Indeed, it was such an abrupt departure from the freak show that one cartoonist, musing on the difficulties of drawing a cartoon on the humour free zone of franking credits yesterday, took to social media to implore Barnaby Joyce to “do something.”

Let’s start with what Shorten’s announcement isn’t. It isn’t taxation reform in any substantial way. The Australian taxation system is and will continue to be unnecessarily complex and complicated, an ongoing garden party for accountants and lawyers but dismally incomprehensible to almost every other Australian.

A week or so ago I joked that Shorten’s media advisers should instruct him to have a long lie in, go into the office late, take the rest of the day off and continue to do so until the next election. Cynically, this is perhaps Shorten’s best pathway to the Lodge.

Before the last election, Labor determined to get a lot of policy into the public domain and while they fell short of forming government, the view is the party’s strategy was the right one. After the 2013 landslide win for the Coalition, Labor’s policy rollout in 2016 put them within one seat of forming minority government.

The Shorten tax proposal is more of the same with an eye to the next federal election.

As Adam Creighton observed in today’s Australian, “Australia’s tax system is shockingly tilted in favour of older, wealthier people, with little justification. Without a proper overhaul, in an era of stagnant wage growth and elevated house prices, that only fuels resentment.”

Labor’s proposals mine that resentment deep and hard. The government’s rhetoric then and now of a Shorten-Labor faux class war does not paint even half the picture. The old resentments between haves and have nots certainly exist and are palpable in the electorate but they find deeper expression across generational divides, among those who despair about housing affordability in the major capital cities with inflation stalking tepid wage growth.

Put succinctly, if by soulless marketing demographics, Shorten’s approach pits Baby Boomers v the rest — the Millennials, the Gen X-ers, the Gen Y-ers and whatever other absurd monikers the marketing folk attach to people these days. Whatever, the iron laws of arithmetic tell us there are more of them than there are of the boomers and in politics, that is enough to win elections.

The take home message is that Labor believes self-funded retirees do not as a rule vote Labor and the political consequences are likely to be minimal. Little downside, lots of upside is the prevailing view within the party at this point in the political cycle.

Labor’s proposal pushes the government further into a corner. Malcolm Turnbull knows he cannot get his company tax cuts through the Senate and has gone to a Plan B of personal income tax cuts but these will come at the expense of adding to the budget deficit and with it, the government’s claims of superior economic stewardship become sorely tested. Ongoing personal tax cuts of any impressive magnitude are almost impossible to fund without wholesale tax reform. The government will be left to tinker at the edges, leaving a benefit to average wage-earning folk of the packet of Chicken Twisties and can of diet Coke variety.

Bear in mind, the 2018-19 Budget will almost certainly be the Turnbull government’s last before the next election. A half Senate election is due no later than 19 May, 2019 (the Reps by 2 November, 2019) and one very much doubts the Turnbull government would create a circumstance where the punters would be obliged to trudge off to the polls twice in one year. Just as likely is a federal election in the latter part of this year.

To paraphrase Black Adder, Bill Shorten has “a plan so cunning you could put a tail on it and call it a weasel.” And without wanting to press the Vaudeville activation button, that weasel is Chris Bowen. Bowen is cast from the NSW right, an economic policy wonk and Keating acolyte. While he is invariably across his brief, it is his skills as a salesman that often fall short.

The reforms-that-aren’t approach is bold, and boldness or courage is not always rewarded in politics as it often veers into callow stupidity when the numbers are scrutinised and fall short or the government of the day spends each and every day picking the policy off to the point where an opposition is left befuddled and paralysed with embarrassment.

But if Chris Bowen can pull it off, Labor has just taken a step closer to forming the next government.