The hard-headed assessment of one of Anthony Albanese’s closest allies is that Peter Dutton is the best thing Labor has going for it at the next election. Not because the unpopular Liberal leader cannot win, but rather because he can.
This creates the circumstances for the election to become not a referendum on the performance of the government but rather a choice between Anthony Albanese’s Labor Party and Peter Dutton’s Coalition. The Labor insider describes the choice like this: “All Dutton has to offer is higher electricity prices and lower wages.”
Certainly, the opposition leader’s performance this week on his uncosted nuclear energy nirvana and the promise to roll back Labor’s workplace relations reforms, weakening workers’ bargaining rights, gives credibility to this criticism.
It remains to be seen if, when the election is called, Dutton will be crazy brave enough to resuscitate the “dead, buried and cremated” WorkChoices policies that crushed the Howard government in 2007. It will also be interesting to see what he has on offer to cut energy bills after stalling the rollout of renewables and before his mooted nuclear reactors begin operating in 20 years’ time.
In the meantime, the opposition leader is taking great encouragement from the trend in all the opinion polls over the past year showing Labor and the Coalition are lineball after preferences, and from the erosion in Albanese’s standing, albeit still with a significant edge in Newspoll.
There is a growing consensus that whoever forms the next government will be in minority. It cannot be assumed Labor will garner the numbers, either at the poll or with support from the cross bench, to retain power.
One of the more assiduous fundraisers for the Coalition in Queensland, Santo Santoro, is encouraged in his task by Dutton’s confidence that he will be prime minister after the 2025 election.
The more optimistic in the opposition camp believe the Reserve Bank’s hard line on interest rates will facilitate this ambition. The Australian’s Simon Benson is not alone in his view that another interest rate rise before the expected May poll would sound the death knell for the government.
The likelihood of this is doubted among leading economists, although the Coalition’s hopes are based on the RBA’s statement that the board is not “ruling anything in or out”. Still, RBA governor Michele Bullock revealed at her news conference that, for the first time in the present cycle, the board did not “explicitly consider a rate rise”.
Economist Stephen Koukoulas fears the governor has imbibed “too much of the theoretical economic Kool-Aid” and says Bullock should follow the example of her 2006 to 2016 predecessor, Glenn Stevens, who was not afraid to move rates up and down more frequently as the circumstances required.
Koukoulas says the RBA should have cut rates by 25 basis points now and another 25 before the end of the year. Given the weakness of the economy, this would hardly ignite an inflationary bushfire, he says, and could always be quickly reversed.
Treasurer Jim Chalmers seized on the fact interest rates had not gone up for the best part of a year and said it “reflects the progress that we have made when it comes to getting inflation down”.
There is frustration in the higher echelons of the government that it doesn’t get enough recognition for its economic management. The Chicken Little reaction of the opposition is to be expected, but as one senior adviser says: imagine the accolades the Coalition would get from The Australian Financial Review or the Murdoch stable if it had produced two budget surpluses and reduced billions of dollars in government debt.
“One of the more assiduous fundraisers for the Coalition in Queensland, Santo Santoro, is encouraged in his task by Dutton’s confidence that he will be prime minister after the 2025 election. The more optimistic in the opposition camp believe the Reserve Bank’s hard line on interest rates will facilitate this ambition.”
Finance Minister Katy Gallagher says when the final budget outcome is released there will be an even bigger surplus than forecast and it will be the result of “less spending on the spending side of the budget”. This is something Bullock has previously welcomed as helping to fight inflation.
Chalmers confronted the criticism he was “manipulating” the inflation statistics with his energy bill and rental relief. Apart from the fact the relief is real, the latest monthly headline result of 2.7 per cent is less than half the 6.1 per cent inherited when Labor came to power. Other indicators are also falling. As the treasurer said, it is very encouraging to see underlying inflation “coming down very considerably as well”, to its lowest level in more than 30 months.
Not well enough, according to the shadow treasurer, Angus Taylor. He says without a sustained fall in prices there will be no interest rate relief from the RBA. His prescription is to “get back to basics”, which includes cutting government spending further. His colleague, Jane Hume, nominated slashing the 36,000 new public servants as one measure. This ignored the fact these public servants were employed to help scale back the use of expensive contractors and address a huge backlog of claims, especially in Veterans’ Affairs, that have led to unconscionable delays for resolution of up to four years.
The government’s frustration is not restricted to its traditional opponents in the Coalition. The hardball the Greens are playing in the Senate over the housing bills and reforms to the Reserve Bank is particularly galling. The Greens have been pursuing an aggressive campaign aimed at increasing their representation in parliament, primarily at Labor’s expense.
A Labor strategist says an analysis of Greens leader Adam Bandt’s social media posts shows he attacks Labor six times more often than the opposition.
This is taking a toll on Labor, as the primary vote tracking in Newspoll reveals, but has done nothing to substantially raise the Greens support in this or other polls. “The big winners,” according to the Labor source, “are the Coalition.”
The failure of the Greens’ strategy was further confirmed in this week’s Essential Report. It found 48 per cent of respondents agreed that the Coalition and the Greens should pass the government’s housing reforms and argue their own priorities at the next federal election. Only 22 per cent support the blocking.
Tellingly, 55 per cent of Greens voters support the passing of the bills. Among Coalition voters, 37 per cent support waving the legislation though compared with 32 per cent who don’t.
The behaviour of the non-government parties in the Senate is typical of behaviour at the business end of the parliamentary cycle. Finance Minister Gallagher nailed it on Monday when she said the Coalition’s decision to renege on agreed reforms to the RBA was pure and opportunistic politics.
Gallagher said the Greens were “just crazy” with their demands that the government overrule the bank and cut the cash rate. “Just think about it,” she said. “They suggest that we do the job of the RBA. Basically, remove its independence, cut interest rates and then they will pass a bill that strengthens its independence. I mean, honestly.”
Among the deadlock, there is a hint Labor might look to scale back negative gearing and capital gains tax concessions. The Sydney Morning Herald broke the story midweek, putting it in the context of Labor asking Treasury to work on options to reduce the multibillion-dollar concessions as part of a package of housing reforms for the next election.
This may well have been an overstatement, with there being nothing unusual in Treasury assessing the ongoing cost of these concessions. Albanese and Chalmers did not, however, rule out revising the policy.
Albanese said he valued the public service and the work it did from time to time “looking at policy ideas”. The treasurer echoed the prime minister, saying the government had a housing policy, and it didn’t include touching these concessions. He called on the Senate to pass the stalled bills to assist the government in fixing housing supply.
The Greens welcomed the kite-flying with their housing spokesman, Max Chandler-Mather, saying the billions saved could be diverted to rent relief and more social housing.
Four Coalition frontbenchers rushed out a release accusing Labor of a “housing tax grab” that would make Australians poorer. The release claimed the “secret plan” would declare war on “homeowners and renters”.
If the government is to avoid falling into minority, or even losing the next election, it will need Anthony Albanese to be on top of his game. There was relief this week in the ranks with the way he handled both the alleged supermarket price gouging and the negative-gearing speculation.
The prime minister will need to stay disciplined and on message, especially as Labor is planning to take a much more ambitious suite of policies to the next election than it did last time. The luxury of being a small target is long gone.
1 Comment
The hard-headed assessment of one of Anthony Albanese’s closest allies is that Peter Dutton is the best thing Labor has going for it at the next election. Not because the unpopular Liberal leader cannot win, but rather because he can.
This creates the circumstances for the election to become not a referendum on the performance of the government but rather a choice between Anthony Albanese’s Labor Party and Peter Dutton’s Coalition. The Labor insider describes the choice like this: “All Dutton has to offer is higher electricity prices and lower wages.”
Certainly, the opposition leader’s performance this week on his uncosted nuclear energy nirvana and the promise to roll back Labor’s workplace relations reforms, weakening workers’ bargaining rights, gives credibility to this criticism.
It remains to be seen if, when the election is called, Dutton will be crazy brave enough to resuscitate the “dead, buried and cremated” WorkChoices policies that crushed the Howard government in 2007. It will also be interesting to see what he has on offer to cut energy bills after stalling the rollout of renewables and before his mooted nuclear reactors begin operating in 20 years’ time.
In the meantime, the opposition leader is taking great encouragement from the trend in all the opinion polls over the past year showing Labor and the Coalition are lineball after preferences, and from the erosion in Albanese’s standing, albeit still with a significant edge in Newspoll.
There is a growing consensus that whoever forms the next government will be in minority. It cannot be assumed Labor will garner the numbers, either at the poll or with support from the cross bench, to retain power.
One of the more assiduous fundraisers for the Coalition in Queensland, Santo Santoro, is encouraged in his task by Dutton’s confidence that he will be prime minister after the 2025 election.
The more optimistic in the opposition camp believe the Reserve Bank’s hard line on interest rates will facilitate this ambition. The Australian’s Simon Benson is not alone in his view that another interest rate rise before the expected May poll would sound the death knell for the government.
The likelihood of this is doubted among leading economists, although the Coalition’s hopes are based on the RBA’s statement that the board is not “ruling anything in or out”. Still, RBA governor Michele Bullock revealed at her news conference that, for the first time in the present cycle, the board did not “explicitly consider a rate rise”.
Economist Stephen Koukoulas fears the governor has imbibed “too much of the theoretical economic Kool-Aid” and says Bullock should follow the example of her 2006 to 2016 predecessor, Glenn Stevens, who was not afraid to move rates up and down more frequently as the circumstances required.
Koukoulas says the RBA should have cut rates by 25 basis points now and another 25 before the end of the year. Given the weakness of the economy, this would hardly ignite an inflationary bushfire, he says, and could always be quickly reversed.
Treasurer Jim Chalmers seized on the fact interest rates had not gone up for the best part of a year and said it “reflects the progress that we have made when it comes to getting inflation down”.
There is frustration in the higher echelons of the government that it doesn’t get enough recognition for its economic management. The Chicken Little reaction of the opposition is to be expected, but as one senior adviser says: imagine the accolades the Coalition would get from The Australian Financial Review or the Murdoch stable if it had produced two budget surpluses and reduced billions of dollars in government debt.
“One of the more assiduous fundraisers for the Coalition in Queensland, Santo Santoro, is encouraged in his task by Dutton’s confidence that he will be prime minister after the 2025 election. The more optimistic in the opposition camp believe the Reserve Bank’s hard line on interest rates will facilitate this ambition.”
Finance Minister Katy Gallagher says when the final budget outcome is released there will be an even bigger surplus than forecast and it will be the result of “less spending on the spending side of the budget”. This is something Bullock has previously welcomed as helping to fight inflation.
Chalmers confronted the criticism he was “manipulating” the inflation statistics with his energy bill and rental relief. Apart from the fact the relief is real, the latest monthly headline result of 2.7 per cent is less than half the 6.1 per cent inherited when Labor came to power. Other indicators are also falling. As the treasurer said, it is very encouraging to see underlying inflation “coming down very considerably as well”, to its lowest level in more than 30 months.
Not well enough, according to the shadow treasurer, Angus Taylor. He says without a sustained fall in prices there will be no interest rate relief from the RBA. His prescription is to “get back to basics”, which includes cutting government spending further. His colleague, Jane Hume, nominated slashing the 36,000 new public servants as one measure. This ignored the fact these public servants were employed to help scale back the use of expensive contractors and address a huge backlog of claims, especially in Veterans’ Affairs, that have led to unconscionable delays for resolution of up to four years.
The government’s frustration is not restricted to its traditional opponents in the Coalition. The hardball the Greens are playing in the Senate over the housing bills and reforms to the Reserve Bank is particularly galling. The Greens have been pursuing an aggressive campaign aimed at increasing their representation in parliament, primarily at Labor’s expense.
A Labor strategist says an analysis of Greens leader Adam Bandt’s social media posts shows he attacks Labor six times more often than the opposition.
This is taking a toll on Labor, as the primary vote tracking in Newspoll reveals, but has done nothing to substantially raise the Greens support in this or other polls. “The big winners,” according to the Labor source, “are the Coalition.”
The failure of the Greens’ strategy was further confirmed in this week’s Essential Report. It found 48 per cent of respondents agreed that the Coalition and the Greens should pass the government’s housing reforms and argue their own priorities at the next federal election. Only 22 per cent support the blocking.
Tellingly, 55 per cent of Greens voters support the passing of the bills. Among Coalition voters, 37 per cent support waving the legislation though compared with 32 per cent who don’t.
The behaviour of the non-government parties in the Senate is typical of behaviour at the business end of the parliamentary cycle. Finance Minister Gallagher nailed it on Monday when she said the Coalition’s decision to renege on agreed reforms to the RBA was pure and opportunistic politics.
Gallagher said the Greens were “just crazy” with their demands that the government overrule the bank and cut the cash rate. “Just think about it,” she said. “They suggest that we do the job of the RBA. Basically, remove its independence, cut interest rates and then they will pass a bill that strengthens its independence. I mean, honestly.”
Among the deadlock, there is a hint Labor might look to scale back negative gearing and capital gains tax concessions. The Sydney Morning Herald broke the story midweek, putting it in the context of Labor asking Treasury to work on options to reduce the multibillion-dollar concessions as part of a package of housing reforms for the next election.
This may well have been an overstatement, with there being nothing unusual in Treasury assessing the ongoing cost of these concessions. Albanese and Chalmers did not, however, rule out revising the policy.
Albanese said he valued the public service and the work it did from time to time “looking at policy ideas”. The treasurer echoed the prime minister, saying the government had a housing policy, and it didn’t include touching these concessions. He called on the Senate to pass the stalled bills to assist the government in fixing housing supply.
The Greens welcomed the kite-flying with their housing spokesman, Max Chandler-Mather, saying the billions saved could be diverted to rent relief and more social housing.
Four Coalition frontbenchers rushed out a release accusing Labor of a “housing tax grab” that would make Australians poorer. The release claimed the “secret plan” would declare war on “homeowners and renters”.
If the government is to avoid falling into minority, or even losing the next election, it will need Anthony Albanese to be on top of his game. There was relief this week in the ranks with the way he handled both the alleged supermarket price gouging and the negative-gearing speculation.
The prime minister will need to stay disciplined and on message, especially as Labor is planning to take a much more ambitious suite of policies to the next election than it did last time. The luxury of being a small target is long gone.