Andrew Bolt: After tax lie, what are Albo’s promises really worth?

A year ago, Anthony Albanese was cheered by the crowd at the Australian Open but this year he was viciously booed. What a difference a lie makes, writes Andrew Bolt.

What a difference a lie makes. One year ago, Anthony Albanese was cheered by the crowd at the Australian Open; this year he was viciously booed.

I hope every boo was because the Prime Minister is a shameless liar who now lies every day about his lie.

I hope that because our democracy depends on voters hating being tricked.

A politician who lies his way into becoming prime minister – and gets away with it – is a politician we can’t control. He’s free to do what he wants, not what he said – and what we agreed to.

And Albanese did lie, and now lies daily. The rot has started. Democracy is weakened.

Albanese promised dozens of times before the election he would deliver the stage-three tax cuts which Parliament made law four years earlier and are due to come in this year – after Australians on lower wages got their own share in the first two stages.

Albanese spent the first weeks of this year still promising those stage-three cuts – “my word is my bond” – right up until January 25 when he said, actually, he’d changed his mind.

He’ll now rip money off people earning above $146,000 – he’ll take more than $4000 from most – and give poor Australian workers $16 a week more, on top of their earlier tax cuts.

The reason Albanese lied about delivering the tax cuts in full is that he thought he’d lose the election had he told the truth.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was booed at the tennis. Picture: Getty Images

And now Albanese lies even about what he’s done.

“Everyone will be getting a tax cut,” he says. “We’ve made sure that everybody gets a tax cut.”

That is false.

The tax cuts for people earning more than $146,000 were already law, thanks to a vote of Parliament in 2019. Albanese isn’t giving those tax cuts, which come from the previous Morrison government. He’s doing the opposite – he’s taking half of them.

For people on $146,000 or more, Albanese is all take, no give.

That’s also true of his next lie – that he’s giving the same amount of tax back to the people, only in a different way.

“It’s the same amount of support,” he keeps claiming.

He’s “keeping the amount of the tax cuts that were envisaged but doing it in a way that helps lower and middle income earners”.

False again. He’s actually giving less. What he’s giving today, he’s stealing back tomorrow.

That’s because Albanese’s big change is to keep the second-highest tax bracket – the 37 per cent one that was going to be scrapped.

That means he can steal back $28bn of his tax cuts over the next decade as inflation pushes another 3 million Australians into this higher tax take.

Albanese’s changes also mean more strife for a tax system that’s under huge stress and is crippling initiative.

Personal income tax raised just over 40 per cent of the government’s total tax take in 2000.

It now raises 50.5 per cent, and will keep rising – just when we’re getting fewer workers for every pensioner they support with their taxes.

But what does Albanese care?

He’s got the Dunkley by-election to win in a month’s time, when his popularity is falling like a stone.

Come the next election, which Albanese promise can you possibly trust? Picture: Tertius Pickard

And, yes, it’s true he’s now giving millions of Australians on less than $146,000 a bigger tax cut.

He’s counting on that extra $16 a week being enough to make them forgive him for being a liar.

Maybe that will indeed save him for now.

But already you can see the damage done by Albanese’s lie – damage that will be most obvious at next year’s election campaign.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers is now being peppered by questions about other promises he could break. For instance, would the government break its promise not to scrap negative gearing or slash franking credits?

Chalmers repeated a form of words that Albanese used to fool us before: “We haven’t changed our view … That’s not something we have considered or are considering.”

Yeah, we’ve sure heard that before.

Here’s Albanese on January 17, denying he will change the stage three tax cuts: “We haven’t changed our position on that.”

Yet just one week later he had.

So come the next election, which Albanese promise can you possibly trust? What are his promises worth, when Albanese has proved he’ll happily break them later for political advantage?

That’s how liars damage democracy. You may think you have the say with your vote, but the liar will always have the last say when he’s in the Lodge