Chris Mitchell column: Facts get lost in poor communication

Malcolm Turnbull’s test will be to explain that the top 20 per cent of taxpayers fork out 84 per cent of all PAYE revenue.

Tuesday night’s television analysis and Wednesday’s morning ­papers were largely positive about Treasurer Scott Morrison’s mai­den budget. If the purpose of this first Turnbull budget had really been to prove the new PM could manage a steady-as-she-goes agenda for jobs and growth, it would have been judged a success.

Even left-wing pundits such as Fairfax Media’s Peter Martin, Crikey’s Bernard Keane and The Australian Financial Review’s Laura Tingle gave the government some points. But of course steadiness was not the name of the game.

The point of this exercise — planned for release a week early and only days before the PM called a July 2 double dissolution election — was to sharpen the differences between the Coalition and Labor: the opposition a big spending risky bet and the government a safe custodian.

While Keane derided the idea of a class war election, by Thursday night Bill Shorten, in his budget reply speech, was making it clear this was exactly what he was aiming at. And by then he had had plenty of help from the usual suspects lining up to repeat the progressive media’s 2014 budget fairness attack.

As early as first thing Monday morning, Fran Kelly, on Radio National, was launching into the Deputy PM about the unfairness of tax cuts that did not go to ­workers earning less than $80,000. Barnaby Joyce only wanted to carp about CARP. He did not want to tread on his Treasurer’s patch, but Fran was having none of it and let the Nationals leader know exactly what she thought about the unfairness of it all, still 36 hours before the budget.

Labor has generally been good at marshalling the Canberra gallery right back to Paul Keating’s days as treasurer in the 1980s. So last week there were plenty of media fairness crusaders willing to run the shock horror line that we have a progressive tax system in Australia. Who would have guessed? Millionaires would get a tax cut of $17,000 a year while the workers the Treasurer was trying to save from bracket creep would get only $6 a week.

Of course, Keating famously reduced tax rates from 60c to 47c but back then journos knew we had a progressive tax system. They must have forgotten. Keating tilled the soil relentlessly with the gallery’s thought leaders. He wanted everyone to know economic growth would lift the poor out of unemployment. Better to float all boats than worry all the time about slicing the pie fairly. He was right and we enjoyed 25 years of uninterrupted growth.

Yet this government could not persuade many in the media that the $1 million a year PAYE earner was already paying about $450,000 a year tax and the poor guy with a stay-at-home wife and two kids on $65,000 really had not been paying tax since John ­Howard’s days as PM.

Tingle even wrote a book about it all back in 2012: Great ­Expectations, Government, Entitlement and an Angry Nation, she called it. I waited and waited for someone to mention the truth about low income Australians (let’s not call them “leaners”, Joe) and their tax bills. Finally it came. This paper’s own Adam Creigh­ton said it on Sky News’s The Bolt Report on Wednesday night.

And to her credit, the ABC’s Leigh Sales nailed Shorten with it on Thursday’s 7.30. Mike Carlton likes to deride “Blot”, as he ungenerously calls Andrew, for his small audience. But it was quite a show on Wednesday. Terry McCrann supported Morrison’s unkind cuts to ­super­annuants like me.

And rightly in my view. As this paper pointed out many times ­before the 2015 budget, super­annuation reforms of the mid-1990s were never designed as a tax shelter. That was all the work of Peter Costello. Bolt was joined by an angry but incisive Mark Latham, who smashed out of control federal government spending by both sides this past decade. He for one was persuasive.

No such conservative heresy from Michael Brissenden and the ABC’s showpiece morning radio program AM. Brisso, who had once betrayed a confidential lunch with Costello, was on the warpath for low income earners. Then on the warpath against tax cuts for business. Then on the warpath against a PM who could not (or would not) quantify the 10-year value of those cuts. Brisso, it must be said, had started the week upset at the government for undermining the opposition’s revenue forecast on its increased ­tobacco taxes, increases the ­government then incorporated in its own finances.

Funniest ABC interview of the week was Wednesday’s World Today on ABC AM. In a free-for all, Motoring Enthusiast Party ­supremo Ricky Muir, all 0.5 per cent Senate support for him, disputed the mandate theory of politics (what is this damn double dissolution and the Constitution about any way?) while Xenophon party supremo Nick Xenophon was given free rein to complain the budget had not created any new industries to replace the car industry in South Australia. Que?

By Saturday there was no sign of a Keating-style persuader anywhere for the hapless Coalition. As John Howard said over a year ago, implying criticism of Tony Abbott, politicians must be able to advocate good policy. And, while he did not say this, advocacy works best when it starts with thought leaders in the media.

Speaking of which, Paul Kelly nailed best on ground for the week on the budget and the election contest in this paper on Saturday. The great communicator Malcolm Turnbull failed to make the obvious points all week: that the top 20 per cent of taxpayers fork out 84 per cent of all PAYE tax and that small businesses employing three million Australians will be able to grow their revenue and their total tax paid if they have more of their own money left to invest in their own businesses.

And back to Tingle’s book, how will Turnbull explain that Howard and Costello used the first phase of the China boom to build an Australia in which half the voters are net recipients of government transfers and only the other half are net payers? This is the political trap for budget ­reformers who can’t advocate for good policy. And it is the big test for Turnbull.