EDITORIAL: Why is the Premier doing a Shorten?

Bill Shorten thought he was on a winner when in 2019 he launched a tax-led attack on the “top end of town”. It backfired but it seems Annastacia Palaszczuk didn’t take notice, writes the Editor.

Former Labor leader Bill Shorten thought he was on a political winner when in 2019 he launched a tax-led attack on what he called the “top end of town”. The problem was that those affected turned out to actually be ordinary hard-working Aussies who had saved through their lives and invested that wealth well.

That triple-tax hit that federal Labor took to the 2019 election first targeted retirees through an attack on the franking credits that many rely on, and second those with property investments via a halving of the capital gains tax concession and limiting the negative gearing tax benefit to new properties only.

It was a tax plan that, of course, backfired spectacularly. The changes scared too many voters, and Labor lost the fight for its heartland – with the biggest swings away from it in the outer suburban booths it would normally be able to rely on. The lesson was that the very people the Labor Party is supposed to serve the interests of actually saw themselves as the victims – real or imagined – of a tax policy that Mr Shorten and those around him had arrogantly thought was only a hit on the rich.

Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk and then federal opposition leader Bill Shorten.

And so it is with the Palaszczuk Labor government and its bizarre land tax change, that every single expert in the property sector warns seriously risks increasing already sky-high rental prices and cutting the number of properties in the already super-tight rental market.

Within the government, this change is being sold as a tax on “a few wealthy investors from the North Shore of Sydney”. But that incorrect view of who invests in property ignores the lesson of that Shorten disaster at the 2019 federal election – that many smart hard-working Labor voters own property.

It also ignores the truth that in a tight rental market any affected landlords will simply pass on to their tenants the entirety of the additional tax hike. That truth means that those who will actually pay the tax (of about $150 a week, according to a government fact sheet) will be people who are renting because they can’t afford to buy – yep, the very battlers Labor says it cares about.

That Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk remains so committed to this tax that she now plans to raise it with other premiers when they meet at national cabinet on Friday is quite simply just incomprehensible.

The only possible explanation is that Treasurer Cameron Dick has decided to dig his heels in on it, having convinced himself that those experts who are criticising the tax are really just out to attack him personally – and that the Premier has decided that she would rather cop the political heat over what will be a new tax on renters than stand up to a belligerent Mr Dick.

The icing on the cake is that all this comes amid the backdrop of the Premier’s sudden determination to show that her government cares about those affected by the state’s critical housing crisis after having been shamed into doing so by The Courier-Mail’s Hitting Home campaign earlier this month.

No government focused on helping those doing it tough would for one minute consider risking the imposition of a new tax that could both see existing tenants hit with higher rents and reduce the number of homes available to rent. No Labor government that actually cared about hard-working battlers would take the same risk. And surely no Labor politician who lived through the Shorten debacle would want to risk a repeat. And yet here we are.