You can’t say Labor aren’t looking after their base, with their first budget.
The workers, you ask? Oh, you sweet, summer child — Labor’s base hasn’t been the workers for decades. The last Labor pollie to ever actually work in a job that wasn’t publicly funded is but a distance memory. Working people don’t vote Labor any more: instead, Labor fights the Greens for the votes of the inner-city middle-classes.
Which is why Labor’s refusal to defer or axe the Morrison government’s scheduled stage 3 tax cuts is hardly the mystery many in the left media want you to believe. On the contrary, it makes perfect sense for them to look after the wealthy who vote for them.
The budget only makes that even clearer.
Here’s the hard reality of the budget: The poor will pay.
This is, bear in mind, from Labor’s own taxpayer-funded media wing, the ABC.
The poor will pay because inflation is a tax on the poor.
They will have to pay more to keep the lights on, to buy shoes for the kids, put fuel in the car and keep the fridge stocked. God forbid they might want to buy a pizza and go to the movies occasionally.
Treasurer Jim Chalmers has delivered a message that should chill families across Australia, but the pain will be felt hardest by the poor or those with heavy mortgages.
In other words, nearly every working family.
Electricity bills are forecast to rise a staggering 56%, gas 40%.
With winter descending there, poor families are having to make the hard decision of whether to eat or heat.
They can’t afford to be both warm and fed.
On the other hand, climate activists will be doing just fine, with $10m of extra government funding. That’ll buy a lot of super glue.
The rich, the home owners, the superannuated: they will do fine. They have a cushion of savings, they’ve banked 30 years of economic growth and their house values have doubled or tripled. They probably have investment properties attracting big rent.
Higher interest rates don’t hurt them, many get richer […]
The poor will get poorer because wages won’t keep up with inflation. They won’t see a real wage rise for at least another year or 18 months.
Remember, Albanese promised no less than 97 times during the election to cut electricity bills and lower the cost of living. Apparently, 32% of Australians actually believed him.
Oh, to be rich. They can look forward to another round of tax cuts. Someone earning $200,000 will be $9,000 a year richer when the stage 3 income tax cuts take effect.
And while there is some relief for poor or working families — minimum wage has increased, extended parental leave, childcare subsidies — the rich share in this largesse, too. The 26 weeks of parental leave will apply to families earning up to $350,000.
And a family can earn more than half a million dollars a year and still be eligible for some childcare subsidies.
ABC Australia
It’s an old truism in politics that a new government should put all the pain in its first budget and hope that voters have forgotten by the next election. But that truism firstly presupposes that the government will have put aside enough money to splash around the goodies at the end of the election cycle. Does anyone seriously think a government where Arts graduates hold all the financial portfolios and the PM is a former hardline communist is actually going to manage that?
More importantly, as the fate of the Abbott government showed, Australians aren’t as likely to fall for that old trick anymore. When Tony Abbott and then-Treasurer Joe Hockey put the pain in their first budget — and specifically went against campaign promises — the reaction was ferocious and fatal. To be sure, a large part of that was the early antipodean iteration of what we later recognised as Trump Derangement Syndrome, but, then, Julia Gillard similarly signed her political death warrant three years earlier by introducing a tax that she had explicitly promised not to.
Abbott and Gillard, it should be noted, won 45% and 38% of the primary vote, respectively. With a record-low primary vote of 32%, can Albanese really afford to give the finger to voters like this?
When Australians are eating bugs in the cold and dark, and unable to get to work because middle-class students and nosey-nannas have glued themselves to every road, even the 32% who did vote Labor will start to have second thoughts.
