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.