Last week the Albanese government signalled a massive shift in its understanding of how to win elections. Its timing meant it arrived with a fascinating parallel, as Scott Morrison announced his impending retirement from politics.
Morrison’s leadership marked the perfection of a trend in our politics: the prioritisation of style over substance. When Anthony Albanese was elected, he looked to be the opposite: a man incapable of theatrics. But as time went on, a funny thing happened. The most important thing about this new government, it came to seem, was not what it was doing – most voters would struggle to list its achievements – but how it did it.
Last week, the Albanese government signalled a massive shift in its understanding of how to win elections.Credit: Jim Pavlidis
It had (we were told) good processes, it pursued change carefully and gradually, and it kept promises. This was better than the Morrison equivalent, and yet in a way we were witnessing the same thing: a government that believed the tone it set, the style in which it governed, was more important than the governing it did – and that this was the measure by which it would be judged at the next election.
By breaking his promise to keep the stage 3 tax cuts, and not in a small fashion but in a large, attention-grabbing way, giving most taxpayers more and the rich less, Albanese has indicated he grasps a quite different lesson: you do not win elections for having kept promises. You win elections for getting things done.
This is the import of the most striking lines from Albanese’s appearance at the National Press Club last Thursday. As politicians, he said, “we cannot say, ‘We are aware of the cost of living, we are just sorry but not in a position to do anything about it.’ I’m the prime minister. I am in a position to do something about it. We are doing something about it.”
Part of the government’s earlier reluctance to touch the tax cuts – and there was definitely reluctance – was its recognition that circumstances might change, which in turn would change the conversation around the shift. As it happens, that conversation has changed in two important ways.
The first is that, by now, people have been living with high costs for a very long time. This is what is missed by commentators who suggest nothing has changed in the past year or two. Dealing with inflation for a few months or a year is very different from having had to deal with it for almost two years. Albanese and Treasurer Jim Chalmers have both made this point.
That is a question of feelings, of course, but here those feelings are based on fact: by now, families on lower and middle incomes, who have borne the brunt of inflation, have spent a lot more than a year ago. This means the political decision is also one of substance, driven by the increasingly urgent question of fairness. And as journalist Peter Martin explained recently, while inflation has technically fallen, the rise in mortgage repayments means this is a misleading measure: things remain really tough.
The second shift is that the conversation around the prime minister is very different from a year ago. Then, people were still relieved he was not Morrison. By now, there are valid questions about who Albanese is and what he wants to do. This was the difficulty with the government’s strategy, until now, of avoiding fights, which left a fuzzy sense of Albanese, and risked branding him as weak.
He sought to portray last week’s decision as brave: a matter of having “the ticker” to act despite controversy. Interestingly, we only reached this point due to two acts of cowardice. The first came from Malcolm Turnbull and his treasurer, Scott Morrison. Unwilling to bear the political pain of an immediate huge tax cut for the rich, they announced one but placed it six years in the future.
The second act of cowardice was Albanese’s promise, in the lead-up to the 2022 election, to keep the tax cuts. And here we come to the issue of how the broken promise will affect Albanese.
Many commentators have referred to John Howard’s “never ever” promise on the GST. In fact, Howard first broke promises just after the 1996 election, referring to “core” and non-core promises. To critics, this sounded disingenuous, but there was political truth to it: in essence, he was saying voters knew what he stood for, and he had delivered on that.
Eight years later this wisdom was endorsed, when Howard stood against Mark Latham with the slogan “Who do you trust?” He realised that in practical terms, “trust” in politics referred to reliability, not honesty: voters wanted someone they understood.
Who did voters think Albanese was when they voted for him? Against him is the fact that his tax pledge did not exist in isolation. It was part of the image he sought to project: the small target. Those who voted for him believing he would do little have every right to feel betrayed. But what about those who chose him believing he was fundamentally a progressive politician who would follow his instincts?
In politics, you can’t avoid risk. The choice is only ever between different types of risk. Having largely failed to define himself, about to deliver tax cuts to the rich in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis, Albanese had to choose between the risk of breaking a promise and the risk of looking like an insubstantial, somewhat lost prime minister.
Last week, Albanese accepted Howard’s wisdom. At the Press Club, he looked more assured than he has for a long time; less stuck in his head. Perhaps it’s easier for politicians to argue for things they believe in.
Howard has another lesson for this government. As prime minister, he delivered several rounds of tax cuts. They helped him win elections, which gave him a legacy. But outside of GST, that legacy does not include the tax cuts themselves, which are barely remembered.
It is perhaps a little unfair to jump forward immediately: the fight over these tax cuts has a way to go. And yet, it is true that the most important question is whether, having finally picked a fight in order to do something it genuinely thinks should be done, the Albanese government gets a taste for it.
Sean Kelly is author of The Game: A Portrait of Scott Morrison, a regular columnist and a former adviser to prime ministers Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd.
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