When Labor’s cabinet signed off on breaking its stage three income tax promise at the start of 2024, one member who reluctantly went along with the group decision warned his colleagues ‘there will be a price to pay for this’.
He was talking about broken trust: ‘we’ll feel it at the next election when people won’t believe what we tell them’, the cabinet minister told his colleagues.
‘Trust is hard to earn but easily lost.’
Fast forward to Sunday and Labor announced what is expected to be its signature re-election policy: A funding boost for Medicare designed to lift bulk billing rates to 90 per cent. An $8.5billion additional spend, with few details where the money will come from.
To the surprise of some within the government, the Coalition quickly matched the commitment, unwilling to fight Labor on an issue that traditionally favours it and not them. Labor had hoped to force significant differences between what the parties were promising on health.
Changing tactics, immediately Labor MPs all the way up to the Prime Minister dismissed the Opposition’s pledge to match the spending promise, telling anyone who would listen that you can’t trust the Coalition on Medicare. They will break their promise, we were promised. Their pledge is untrustworthy because they want to destroy Medicare.
It was a window into how the government plans to fight the election and we’ve heard this before.
You do have to love the irony that Anthony Albanese has now built his bid for re-election around a similar policy narrative to the one Bill Shorten used to try and defeat Malcolm Turnbull at the 2016 election. It almost worked, Turnbull won the election with the barest of majorities, squandering the large majority Tony Abbott had won at the previous election.
I’m old enough to remember Albanese’s private criticisms of Shorten’s disingenuous tactics back then, lamenting that the scare campaign being used lacked integrity and wouldn’t work.
Notwithstanding the irony he’s now copying the Shorten playbook anyway, it is hard for this PM or anyone in his team to preach on the subject of trust when they point blank broke election promises three years ago.
‘Trust is hard to earn but easily lost.’
Labor promised not to repeal the stage three tax cuts ahead of the 2022 election but they did. They promised there would be no new taxes on superannuation back then, but they tried to legislate new super taxes during this term, only to be thwarted by the senate.
There is no high moral ground for Albanese to occupy from which to throw barbs at the Coalition. When Labor says only it can be trusted to honour spending proposals for Medicare, they do so with a blemished record of honouring election pledges.
Which is perhaps one of the reasons why the extraordinary Resolve opinion poll released last night revealed support for the government and PM continues to ebb away.
Other reasons for Labor’s declining fortunes include its poor handling of the Voice referendum, cost of living pressures and 12 consecutive interest rate rises before last week’s rate cut.
People feel worse off now than they did three years ago when Labor came to power.
Trailing the Coalition 45-55 percent on the two party vote, with a record low primary vote of just 25 percent according to the Resolve poll, were such results to be mirrored on election day Albanese would lose.
The PM and his team will be hoping Sunday’s Medicare announcement helps turn Labor’s fortunes around. But not if voters pause to consider how unreliable any promise the government makes really is, based on past performance.
‘Trust is hard to earn but easily lost.’
The Resolve poll comes despite a drop in interest rates, with a comfortable majority of voters (59 per cent) saying it didn’t change their vote anyway. It’s unlikely there will be a second rate cut before the election is due in mid May.
There is no escaping the reality that the PM has become an almighty drag on his party’s vote, and few within the government have much faith in Albo’s ability to turn things around during a campaign.
Most believe he is a poor campaigner, based on his lacklustre 2022 campaign effort. The then opposition’s best week came when Albanese was laid up at home with Covid and others did the campaigning for him.
Back on the issue of Medicare, fiscal conservatives no doubt worry about how either major party will fund the promise to massively upscale spending. Team Dutton probably worries about that too, even if Team Albo does not.
But the Opposition was clearly more worried about giving Labor a point of difference on this policy front, so it committed the same cash quickly, to narrow the government’s capacity to mount a scare campaign. Labor did not expect that.
I still think Albo will pull off an albeit ugly victory by the time election day rolls around. Winning minority government with the support of the Greens and perhaps a few others remains my tip for the election outcome.
Labor doesn’t have to lift its two party vote into the 50s to make that happen. It can sandbag enough key seats in the right states to retain government with a national two party vote as low at 48 percent, perhaps even slightly less. As long as its vote continues to hold up in Western .
But such a win won’t come easily. The PM can’t be trusted, isn’t a great campaigner, and with every additional bad poll his colleagues lose faith in campaign HQ’s strategy.
Labor needs some sort of a lift to ensure rising ill-discipline doesn’t make losing become a self-fulfilling prophecy.