“A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting its boots on”. This aphorism (spuriously attributed, as usual, to Mark Twain), is equally applicable to the contrast between superficial political commentary and serious political analysis.
We’ve seen a striking example in the media coverage of the government’s recently announced plans to limit tax concessions for those with superannuation benefits in excess of $3m, representing about 0.5% of the population. The estimated budget saving from this measure is about $2bn a year, when it comes into effect after the next election. This assumes, of course, that Labor will be re-elected.
Our current absurd system was built up over many decades by Labor and LNP governments alike. They culminated in Peter Costello’s final measures, including the abolition of tax on superannuation income for those over 60.
Ever since Costello left his parting gift of fiscal sabotage, governments of both parties have tried to rein in the worst of the rorts in the face of ferocious opposition from a variety of lobby groups.
The initial reaction from the mass media to Labor’s suggestion of a $3m concession cap was overwhelmingly negative. The opposition of the Murdoch press was predictable. Even so, the ferocity of the response was surprising, with slogans like “class warfare”, “socialist” and even “pure communism”. The reflexive use of these extreme terms in response to modest changes in tax policy must be wearing out their effectiveness, but they still seem to press the right buttons for the Murdoch media’s core audience of well-off retirees.
Where the Murdoch press led, the rest of the media (Nine newspapers, the ABC, breakfast TV and talk radio) mostly followed. In the absence of any serious analysis, most of the discussion turned on the “he said, she said” debate about the Coalition’s claim that the policy shift represented a broken promise.
In the absence of an unambiguous statement one way or the other, there was plenty of room for the kind of detailed parsing of words in which the press gallery excels. A debate along these lines can only harm the government concerned.
For a while, it seemed as if media opposition might be successful in derailing the policy. The Nine papers observed “Could Labor win this row? Not with its rhetoric so far.”
But then things changed. First, the economics profession weighed in – almost unanimously in support of the policy change. While there is plenty of disagreement about policies like the superannuation guarantee, it is obvious to any economist that superannuation tax concessions are far more generous than can be justified on grounds of efficiency and equity.
The best defence raised by a handful of LNP partisans is that the magnitude of the “tax expenditures” involved in the superannuation system has been overstated.
Then a couple of Liberal backbenchers – Bridget Archer and Russell Broadbent – had the honesty to admit that these changes were exactly the kind of reform the previous government had pursued, with mixed success. Archer and Broadbent represent what remains of the fiction that the Liberal party, unlike Labor, does not exact unthinking adherence to the party line.
Finally, and not for the first time, writers on social media platforms such as Twitter and Mastodon and in news sites like Crikey and the Conversation presented a counterweight to the trivialities of the mass media. The economic issues were aired more thoroughly and frequently. Moreover, the longstanding social media critique of Australian political journalism was applied to the way this issue was handled.
There is plenty of appalling material to be found on social media, but there is also better analysis than most of what we get from the “quality” media, let alone the Murdoch press and talk radio.
By the time cabinet confirmed the $3m cap on Tuesday, the debate had clearly turned around, though of course nothing changed in the Murdoch world. The press gallery was quick to detect the change in the wind. Only four days after pronouncing the policy a loser, the Nine papers described it as “a small change to superannuation that is cleverly designed to keep most Australians happy while driving his opponents into a conservative ditch”.
We shouldn’t overstate the magnitude of this win. Despite Angus Taylor’s denunciation of the $3m cap, it’s entirely possible that he would have introduced something similar if theCoalition had scraped back into power.
Reforms to superannuation concessions have a long way to go, but hopefully the fear that they are politically untouchable has been dispelled.
