Labor’s $5 tax cut and the Liberal’s one-year fuel plan are miles from Australia’s real budget debates | David Penberthy

Remember when leaders like Bob Hawke or John Howard had the backbone to take on the real challenges facing Australia, writes David Penberthy.

For a long time in this country politics was a contest of ideas.

Now it resembles a game show. Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton look more like Ian Turpie and Tony Barber than Bob Hawke and John Howard.

Have we got a deal for you, Labor said as it unveiled its five buck a week tax cut.

Rubbish, the Libs replied, responding with an utterly stupid and short term fuel excise “plan” which cuts $750 from the cost of petrol, and then stops immediately in a year’s time.

The laughably modest tax “cut” unveiled in Tuesday’s budget is the political equivalent of buying your wife a crappy bunch of flowers from the local service station and being surprised when she rightly displays little in the way of gratitude.

TELL US MORE IN THE COMMENTS

At a time of great financial difficulty for working class and middle class Australians, it’s the tax cut equivalent of three limp lilums wrapped in purple cellophane, bought as an embarrassing afterthought on the way home from work.

Given this unexpected budget was the creation of a looming cyclone which derailed the election campaign, it is hard to pinpoint exactly when Jim Chalmers had his tiny tax break brainwave.

But the scale of the $5-a-week “saving” – which doesn’t even start form another year – is so small as to be negligible to any working person.

Indeed with insurance premium increases, private health care hikes and the slated 9 per cent rise in power bills forecast by AEMO, the real life impact of this five buck bonanza is not unlike finding a 10 cent piece lurking in the ashtray in your car.

Eureka! We are set. Let’s party.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese during Question Time at Parliament House in Canberra. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

The real silliness of this tax plan is that in an individual sense it’s so small as to be imperceptible; but in its national impact, big enough to blow a $17 billion ding in the Federal Budget, further consigning Australia to its looming decade of unavoidable debt and deficit on current trends.

Far better to have allocated the money for something substantial and enduring – like paying outright for the full cost of a new and much-needed Adelaide Women’s and Children’s Hospital, just to throw one meaningful idea out there.

It might have been a failure in terms of addressing cost of living concerns, but the Jim Chalmers tax plan provides a suitably dismal curtain raiser to what looms as a seriously uninspiring election campaign.

Both sides of politics seem to be doing an equally good job driving down their primary vote by failing to provide anything resembling vision or leadership.

It is hard to think that in a political sense Australia is the same country set against the achievements and risks which defined the 1980s and 1990s, when figures such as Bob Hawke and Paul Keating and John Howard and Peter Costello ruled the land.

The achievements of the Hawke and Howard eras seem unthinkable today in this climate of bipartisan political timidity.

Imagine doing something as bold as floating the dollar, abolishing the dead hand of tariffs to pursue free trade agreements, privatising our national bank, airline and telco provider, or introducing a new and sensible tax in the GST to address the revenue crisis facing the Commonwealth.

We are stuck in a politically risk averse era where government sees its job as the piecemeal disbursement of cash back to people who’ve already forgone it through the tax system, and where the opposition is too spooked by the fear of losing to offer anything substantially different.

On IR, consider the legacy of Hawke – apparently Albo’s hero – in creating the Accord between business and the unions to drive up productivity and implement a results-based-approach to wages through enterprise bargaining.

Today, the dominant industrial debate is whether public servants should be allowed to keep working from home, even though the pandemic which forced WFH finished several years ago.

On energy, Labor remains in total denial about the structural and reliability problems smashing our cost of living by driving costs up and sending businesses to the wall.

Yet in contrast, the Libs have provided nothing concrete to change things, save for the ambitious but possibly unachievable promise to roll out nuclear power plants across the land.

Whatever benefits come from that idea, if indeed is it achieved, will not be felt for a very long time.

Peter Dutton and his very thin frontbench appear trapped in their own paranoid world whereby they hope to win the election by promising to do almost everything Anthony Albanese is doing.

But to return to these paltry tax cuts, it is here where Labor hopes it has laid a trap for the Opposition.

Opposition Peter Dutton during Question Time. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

By goading the Libs into opposing the tax cut, as trifling as it might be, the hope is that Labor can campaign not so much on its own record but by painting Dutton as a miserable sod who would even stand in the way of a modest $5 a week.

What we are seeing on this is politics being played on behalf of people who have no real interest in politics, no desire to see issues like productivity or serious tax reform on the table, no desire to take part in the important global debate about whether we need to dramatically increase our defence spending in a rapidly changing and less reliable world.

There is no discussion of anything difficult like bracket creep, or heaven forbid whether the GST fixed at 10 per cent is purpose built to fund our future needs with an ageing population and a ballooning NDIS.

Instead, it’s going to be an orgy of meaningless platitudes about no-one being left behind, lots of fearmongering about Dutton, while Dutton stands there insisting he’s in lock step with Albo on every contentious big-spending Labor measure the Liberals may have historically resisted.

The sad things is that five bucks a week isn’t enough to buy a pay television subscription or the requisite amount of tequila to make sure you don’t have to numb your mind by watching this looming election spectacle, which is going to be about as far from a contest of ideas as you could imagine.

Originally published as Labor’s $5 tax cut and the Liberal’s one-year fuel plan are miles from Australia’s real budget debates | David Penberthy