There are two key consequences of the Albanese government’s turnaround on stage 3 tax cuts. In the short-term, it halted the rot that had put the government in serious danger of losing the next election. In the longer term, it signalled a shift in the government’s internal dynamics, enhancing the status of the treasurer, Jim Chalmers. For those who favour the Labor Party, that latter development could not have come soon enough.

Politically, 2023 was federal Labor’s annus horribilis. The prime minister started off badly and never genuinely got into gear. As the year went on, voters started to desert him, and the government squandered the advantages it had over the Coalition on a range of issues, most significantly its understanding of cost-of-living pressures.

Credit: Illustration: John Shakespeare

Alarmingly, that was mostly the leader’s own work. Having led the ALP into office, Anthony Albanese had things all his own way inside the caucus. He was overwhelmingly the face of the government, and the effect was a gradual loss of faith in Labor within electorally important segments of the community.

Make no mistake, by the end of last year, the ALP was in real trouble. Its primary vote has for some years been in steady decline. It currently sits in the low 30s, and there is no magical floor below which it cannot fall. The latest Newspoll might not have registered a lift in Labor’s support, but the finding that really mattered was the 62 per cent of those surveyed who approved of the government’s rejigging of stage 3.

The Coalition and its media backers can go on about Labor’s broken promise, and Albanese’s word no longer being his bond, but a large majority of voters will be deaf to that message. So Labor’s slide has been paused, but the harder work of regaining trust begins in earnest, and that’s where Chalmers comes in.

The gold standard governments of recent political history were those that had a strong treasurer who consistently acted as a high-level source of policy ideas and a second authoritative voice of the government. Peter Costello fulfilled that role all the way through the Howard era.

Prior to that, Paul Keating was a policy driver and powerful advocate for the Hawke government for more than eight years. In both cases, the treasurer-prime minister partnerships were central to the sustained electoral success of those governments. This was especially so during their first two terms, when they pursued a more dynamic approach to policy and were imprinting what could be called their brand on the public consciousness.

That sort of arrangement is now in prospect for Chalmers and Albanese. The switch on stage 3 is something of a win for Chalmers, who early in the life of the government flew a series of kites about rearranging the schedules within the package, which had been the brainchild of Malcolm Turnbull and his treasurer Scott Morrison in 2018. Chalmers’ exploratory effort went nowhere, which was not surprising given the risk-averse nature of Albanese’s approach to leadership from the moment he succeeded Bill Shorten in 2019.