Anthony Albanese has spent a year on the ropes but suddenly he’s got Peter Dutton on the back foot | Samantha Maiden
It almost looks like Anthony Albanese could have channelled Muhammad Ali’s most famous moment on purpose, writes Samantha Maiden.
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Rope-a-dope is a boxing strategy, most famously used by Muhammad Ali against George Foreman, where a boxer leans against the ropes allowing their opponent to exhaust themselves by throwing punches.
Just when the opponent is tired, the rope-a-dope guy delivers a knockout blow.
It would be a sick fantasy to suggest that such a strategy has been deployed in recent months by Anthony Albanese.
The truth is he’s been getting punched up, politically speaking, for real.
But the impact, strangely enough, is the same.
The Prime Minister has been so ineffective that the Liberal Party has been lulled into complacency.
And that complacency could now prove deadly, as Treasurer Jim Chalmers brings out the big guns – a $17 billion tax cut, a huge injection into Medicare and a $150 energy rebate, as inflation starts tracking in the right direction.
So far, Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has voted against Labor’s tax cuts but hinted he could outgun them with his own.
This is a book with the final chapter still unwritten.
The response to the Treasurer’s fourth budget has been tough for good reasons.
Despite costing $17 billion over the next five years, the tax cuts start at just $5 a week.
Australians can expect an itty-bitty tax cut of an extra $5 a week for anyone earning more than $45,000 from next year, in a surprise election bribe that will be hard-pressed buying most voters a cup of coffee.
It compares with a $5 tax cut offered by the former treasurer Peter Costello in 2003, which was lampooned at the time as “piddling” and not enough to buy a “sandwich and a milkshake”.
But building on existing stage three tax cuts brought in by Labor last year, the changes will deliver the average worker a total tax cut of $2548 a year or about $50 a week.
The federal government is billing the changes as a double tax cut because it also increased the Medicare levy low-income thresholds.
Over the next decade from 2024, the average Aussie will pay $30,000 less tax than they would have if the Morrison government and the Albanese government had not embarked on and then implemented tax reform.
And that’s something that the Labor Party can rightly spruik as the Prime Minister prepares to visit the governor-general this weekend.
The question is whether voters will be underwhelmed and if Mr Dutton and his treasury spokesman have the political smarts to rip the plan apart.
The tax cuts will be delivered by cutting the 16 per cent tax rate that applies to all earnings between $18,201 and $45,000.
From July 1, 2026, the 16 per cent tax rate will be dropped to 15 per cent and the following year it will be dropped to 14 per cent.
What it means is that very low income workers, for example high school students earning under the tax free threshold of $18,200, will receive no relief at all.
What’s fascinating is that Mr Chalmers, who championed a better deal for low and middle income earners, is giving everyone the same tax cut.
It doesn’t matter if you’re earning $200,000 or $65,000. You get $268 in additional tax cuts in 2026.
The following year that additional tax cut doubled to $536. Once again, it doesn’t matter if you earn $500,000 a year or $50,000.
Remember, it was this Treasurer who took the scalpel to Scott Morrison’s original tax cuts and sliced in half the cuts to the rich.
If the Prime Minister was planning these tax cuts when he appeared last month at the The Advertiser’s Building a Bigger, Better SA event at SkyCity casino, he wasn’t giving much away.
“Well, I’m not here to announce election policy. That would make the election campaign pretty boring,” he told the audience of business, political and community leaders.
During a separate question and answer session, Mr Dutton argued the former Coalition government had legislated all three tax cut stages, as he also left the door open for similar cost-of-living relief while blasting Labor’s energy rebates as inflationary.
“So is our desire to reduce taxes and make a term fair and simpler? Of course it is,” he said.
Mr Dutton will outline his formal response to the budget on Thursday night. The Prime Minister is tipped to call the election as soon as this weekend.
There’s a lot riding on what Mr Dutton has to say.
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