The deep sense of frustration that characterised our collective mood at the end of 2023 risks boiling over into outright anger.
The post-pandemic inflation crisis, our challenged national identity, the ongoing trauma of Gaza and the lived experience of climate change has us stewing in our own juices.
This raised temperature is a renewable resource for a political ecosystem that feeds of division and vitriol; media outlets desperate for clicks and platforms that privilege the noise in consensus that a moment of peace is a wasted chance to monetise attention.
The first Guardian Essential Report for 2024 reinforces this political powder keg, with the traditional respite of summer where the mood swings to incumbents as people disconnect from the noise no longer providing the relief of a light evening southerly.
Desperate to tap this negative energy, the opposition has been busy popping the angry pills with Peter Dutton’s vociferous attack on Woolworths’ refusal to sell cheap, knock-off national flags a proxy for woke cultural elites telling no-nonsense Aussies what to think.
Meanwhile, Barnaby Joyce is hard at work whipping up anger at the offshore windfarms, part of his broader game to hold back the transition to renewables.
The ham-fisted attempts by ABC management to placate the angry Israel lobby by sacking an announcer over her online posts creates a new sideshow to exercise this mutually reinforcing vitriol.
Into this vortex, Labor has lobbed its decision to rework the former Morrison government’s plan to flatten Australia’s tax base, shifting some of the disproportionate windfall offered to those at the top of the scale to lower and middle income earners.
After waving those changes through in opposition and vowing to implement them in full, Labor has made the calculated decision to break the commitment it made before the 2022 election, which it has repeated many times since.
It’s too early to gauge the public response to this change definitively: we were already in field but slipped this benchmark question in last Wednesday when the briefing about the change began but before the details of the plan were realised.
These numbers suggest Labor may be able to build support via pure mathematics, with 11.5 million families materially better off, compared with the million wealthiest Australians who will still trouser significantly higher tax breaks.
The big risk is the broader damage to the PM’s reputation as the conflict machine that is our media revs up every voice of grievance to deploy its well-worn template of destroying leaders for lying.
“My word is my bond” is a devastating soundbite; which is why Anthony Albanese has moved slowly to remove what is – by any criteria – a regressive policy.
Dutton is already signalling his election game plan: characterise the PM as a liar, trust his media boosters to undermine Albanese’s legitimacy at every opportunity and then set the scene for an election where every commitment is contested as a future broken promise.
But Dutton entering a character showdown with Albanese carries its own landmines, with his own personal regard lower that the prime minister’s, even at this nadir in his first term.
Dutton’s instinct to divide means he is now firmly in line with the global Trump impersonators for who this year’s US presidential circus will provide new models of fear and loathing.
More immediately, he will need to navigate a credible story on tax cuts. He has also been forced to jettison Sussan Ley’s kneejerk vow to reinstall them, recognising that an election fought on tax cuts for the rich is off brand since the defection of the Liberal base to the teals.
These changes will need to be legislated and every no vote will become testament to the opposition’s commitment to privilege and inequality, much like the scores of votes against restoring workers’ rights have already been cast and noted for future reference.
The challenge for the PM will be to redirect the anger about the broken promise, while maintaining his fundamental integrity. Here he is faced with the choice to concede the lie, deny it or own it. The good news is there are lessons from previous leaders who have faced their own “moment of truth”.
When Julia Gillard was forced into a power-sharing agreement with the Greens that included a price on carbon, she made the foolish calculation to concede that a pre-election commitment that she would not introduce a “carbon tax” was a lie. The subsequent gender-tainted, “Jul-iar” assault proved devastating.
When Tony Abbott backflipped on a multitude of promises to deliver his 2014 austerity budget, he chose the different tack, asserting the he had “fundamentally kept faith” with the Australian people, ending his election honeymoon before it really began.
You need to go back to “Honest Johnny” Howard to see someone who so successfully defused the truth bomb. He took his broken “never, ever GST” vow to an election; after recasting election commitments as “core” and “non-core” promises.
But it was in 2004 when his government was at its lowest ethical ebb that he showed his true mastery. With the government found to have willingly concocted claims of asylum seekers throwing children overboard, the PM ordained the 2004 election would be about trust: “who do you trust to keep interest rates low?” spoke to voters’ material needs as well as the inexperience and instability of his opponent, Mark Latham.
For Albanese, this could be his moment to create a new trust frame: redefining the question as: “who do you trust to stand up for working Australians?”; the vast majority of whom don’t hit the $180,000 threshold, don’t have investment properties, don’t even come close.
This starts with a clear explanation of the how the changes work, how Labor has shifted limited resources to the people who need it more.
But it goes beyond one single policy. The tax cuts need to be part of an ongoing series of interventions in support of the material needs of voters to define the government and differentiate it from the opposition’s cynicism.
Making the economy work more fairly for ordinary Australians is more than a talking point. It is the sum of all the decisions a government makes and the choices its opposition takes; and these are rightly the issues of consequence that will define the next year of politics.
Get it right and the decision to maintain the integrity of our precious progressive tax system will be seen as a turning point in the story of Albanese Labor, one that takes the heat out of the cost-of-living crisis and gets it back on to the path to long-term government.
Peter Lewis is an executive director of Essential, a progressive strategic communications and research company
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