Ready or not, Bill Shorten will be changing Australia

“Women and men of Australia,” Bill Shorten began on Thursday, echoing the focus groups echoing Gough echoing Curtin. The Opposition Leader has downshifted into very old-school Labor for the coming campaign, not a Hawke or Keating motif in sight. In his budget in reply address, as close to an election launch speech you will hear in parliament, Mr Shorten brought all the strands together of the policy manifesto Labor has been plotting after it lost office in 2013. Not since Fightback in 1993 has an opposition offered such a radical departure from the mind-numbing, slogan-rich faux campaigns of recent times, when two tribes did not go to war. Mr Shorten should be praised for offering up a broad-ranging scheme, something alternative prime ministers have not been brave enough to do. He intends to do nothing less than rattle the country’s values, redistributing income from old to young, rich to poor.

Labor’s fiscal plan would require more spending, more revenue and greater intervention in the labour market and economy — the antithesis of its successful record of economic management and reform under Bob Hawke and Paul Keating from 1983 to 1996. Over his final six budgets as treasurer, Mr Keating kept average real spending growth to zero. Taxation as a share of the economy fell to 22 per cent when he was prime minister; it is now 25 per cent. Shorten Labor is raising an extra $200 billion in revenue over 10 years by cracking down on negative gearing, doubling capital gains tax, ending cash refunds for excess franking credits, raising taxes on discretionary trusts, and slugging high earners with a 2 per cent budget repair levy.

Labor’s tax magic pudding — also fed by fiscal drag and high export prices — will be splurged on a vast array of shiny things, from education to health, electric vehicles to motorways. “We will put back every single dollar the Liberals have cut from public schools and public hospitals,” Mr Shorten said. Labor is reviving the age of entitlement, when everyone scored a handout from Canberra, paid for by those working towards the higher end of the income scale. “Australians deserve the best,” Mr Shorten declared, as long as someone else pays for it. Labor believes the Coalition’s plan for a flatter income tax structure — bringing the top marginal rate for 94 per cent of workers to 30c in the dollar in 2024 — is the work of right-wing extremists. Instead, it will direct tax cuts to those who pay the least, in raw dollars or as a percentage of their incomes, as part of its Fair Go Action Plan. Labor plans to change industrial laws to favour the lowest paid with a “living wage”. “We’ve tried it their way, the invisible hand, leave it to the market — we know how that ends,” Mr Shorten said of stagnant wages. Didn’t Labor create this system?

Much of the electorate is oblivious to the vast scale of change being proposed, as Labor has zeroed in on fleecing the aged asset-rich and high earners in a precision strike on enterprise and self-reliance clunky class warrior Wayne Swan could only dream about. Under the banner of intergenerational fairness, Mr Shorten is exploiting generation Y and millennials’ fear of missing out: the property game and tax system is stacked against you because boomer property investors are abusing negative gearing. Mr Shorten promises a better deal for gen Spotify, not lectures about “smashed avo” from Double J oldies. In this inter-gen equity vein, Labor promises “real action” — last used by Tony Abbott in 2010 — on climate change, “for the sake of the Australia we hand on to our children”.

Mr Shorten, who ran the father of all scare campaigns at the 2016 election on health, accuses his opponents of trading on fear. He claims the Coalition is fixated on telling people to be afraid of change, new ideas, the future and of each other. “We choose hope over fear,” Mr Shorten said. But the Labor leader pushed his own fear buttons in the community, perhaps leaving some people with false hopes that he can fix their problems. The attention-grabbing Medicare cancer plan swung the fiscal debate to health, rather than the surplus, which was the Morrison government’s budget selling point. Mr Shorten used the word “cure”, carefully, in relation to the C-word, the “emperor of all maladies”. In a nation where every second person will be diagnosed with cancer at some stage in life, it is the epitome of health fears. Labor has got your attention. Even in budget week, the Coalition’s set-piece economic extravaganza, Mr Shorten has steered the conversation to Medicare, a policy area where Labor can never lose.

If Mr Shorten wins the election, and he has been the frontrunner for a very long time, fairness will get a makeover. It will be on for young and old. Greed will be out but envy will be OK. Aspiration will struggle for breath while every second person will drive an electric vehicle, restoring, Mr Shorten says, three very precious words: Made in Australia. Canberra will play a bigger part in your life. On his last legs in the 1996 campaign, Mr Keating sounded a dire warning: “When the government changes, the country changes.” The coming election is make or break for the nation, a fork in the road. If voters change the government, strap yourselves in for a wild ride.