Andrew Bolt: Bill Shorten can’t be written off yet — he’s still alive and kicking
THE hints that Bill Shorten’s leadership is under threat are misplaced — there’s life in the Labor chief yet, writes Andrew Bolt.
Andrew Bolt
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BILL Shorten is a victim of his own success. Under him, Labor has led the Turnbull government in the polls for a record-breaking 21 months.
That’s bored journalists. Remember that as you now read that Shorten is on the ropes after his bizarre announcement that he’d scrap business tax cuts.
See, no reporter wants to keep filing the same story at every poll: “Labor leads, Turnbull flops.”
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So this year reporters have mounted a death watch on Shorten instead, justified by a largely irrelevant fact — Shorten, like most opposition leaders, is personally less popular than the Prime Minister, even though he’d beat him.
The reporting has been breathless. Remember how Shorten was going to lose the Batman by-election and then be replaced by his popular Leftist rival, Anthony Albanese?
Didn’t happen. Labor won.
Remember how the government would blow Shorten away with its Budget, full of tax cuts?
Didn’t happen. Shorten promised even bigger tax cuts for poorer Australians.
And here we go again.
Now we’re told Shorten may be destroyed by the five by-elections next month, most caused when Labor MPs were found to be dual citizens.
We’re told that if Labor loses just one seat Shorten is toast. Not in nearly a century will an Opposition have lost a by-election to the government.
And Labor may well lose one or even two — Braddon in Tasmania, where a former popular Liberal MP is standing again, or Longman in Queensland, where One Nation will switch its preferences from Labor to the Coalition.
So there are understandable reasons why Labor could lose, but Albanese and Turnbull supporters prefer their mega-story — Shorten is poison with the public.
Albanese has, curiously, been adopted by many conservatives as Labor’s hope. He in turn has proclaimed Shorten’s uselessness at parties around the country.
He put out more feelers in his Whitlam Oration last week, declaring Labor shouldn’t seem at war with business (as Shorten is): “Our job is not to sow discord.”
But hang on: Albo, the businessman’s friend? Seriously?
I like Albanese, but he is of Labor’s Left and was Deputy Prime Minister in the combative Gillard government.
He famously declared “I like fighting Tories” and his Whitlam Oration gave no sign that he would give us fewer of the Labor tax grabs that have infuriated business.
The opposite, in fact. “Our conservative opponents … rarely think beyond tax cuts for the wealthy and slashing spending on education, health and essential services,” Albanese said.
And he praised Shorten’s negative gearing and other tax grabs as in Labor’s “reform tradition”.
Yet Albanese got another sniff at his rival’s job this week, when the media beat up a rare Shorten mistake.
Shorten on Tuesday said Labor planned to scrap one of the business tax cuts the government has so far got through parliament — the 2.5 per cent cut for businesses with a turnover between $10 million and $50 million.
The media attacked Shorten for making a highhanded “captain’s call”, having not first got approval from his shadow cabinet “in a risk-laden political move that has been privately condemned by shadow cabinet colleagues”. Like Albanese, I bet.
But wait. The evidence suggests the normally ultra-cautious Shorten simply made a rare mistake — a word-vomit that should be old news by next week.
Consider. He made this big tax announcement without his shadow treasurer or even a press release to explain it.
He made it not at a press conference, but in response to a random question from a reporter who’d stopped him.
And he made it after giving a loose answer to one question which allowed the reporter to deduce the answer to the next — and to put the obvious question Shorten couldn’t dodge without seeming a fumbler:
Journalist: What size of business … deserves a tax cut?
Shorten: We will support any Australian business with an under $2m turnover … Beyond that, we’re considering our position between $2 and $10 million turnovers …
Journalist: So you will repeal the tax cut between $10 and $50 million …?
Shorten: Yes.
Shorten critics now attack Shorten for this “captain’s call”, but he actually stated a policy Labor would almost certainly have adopted anyway and which senior colleagues had approved.
True, his tax grabs are dangerous politically and unhelpful economically.
But they do raise the cash Shorten needs for his promised spending on health and schools and to pay down more of our debt.
That does not seem a shocking political strategy for a Labor leader. I’d hold the obituaries for now.
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