Do you ever wonder why Australia is spinning its wheels on some of the biggest policy challenges of our time? There are lots of reasons for this, but key among them is the relentless rise of catchphrase politics.
Policy complexity gets reduced to a soundbite, often for the sole purpose of wedging political opponents. In communications terms, it’s often cut-through, but it’s a triumph of the short term over the long term.
Here are some of the starker examples.
Super for housing
Scott Morrison on Sunday used his official campaign launch to announce a policy allowing first-home buyers to access up to $50,000 of retirement savings for a house deposit. This is simple enough to be a cut-through idea. Some young people locked out of the housing market will doubtless be frustrated at being unable to save for a deposit. Given retirement will seem a long way away, they will wonder why they can’t access their own money to fund their most important purchase.
Morrison is trying to tap this opportunity cost sentiment as he sprints to election day. He’s gone for this measure in part to provoke an argument with Labor. Morrison’s plan sounds logical, but in truth, this measure is highly problematic. Economists say policies that stimulate demand, like this one, will drive up housing prices even further. That trend benefits property owners, not people trying to get into the market.
There’s also an equity issue – why should young people have to raid their retirement savings to buy a house when governments could act to address house price inflation by building more dwellings and overhauling the tax concessions that benefit investors rather than owner-occupiers?
Axe the tax
Three words that triggered Australia’s destructive, pointless climate wars. This simple slogan is the core of the partisan weaponisation of climate action. The short version of this story is the Gillard government legislated a carbon price during the 43rd parliament. Tony Abbott promptly dubbed the carbon price a tax and built a brutally effective campaign around repealing it with a view to winning the 2013 election. That campaign succeeded in part because Labor, too readily, accepted Abbott’s nomenclature.
Years later, Abbott’s chief of staff, Peta Credlin, was candid about their zero-sum political tactics. “It wasn’t a carbon tax, as you know. It was many other things in nomenclature terms but we made it a carbon tax,” Credlin said in February 2017. “We made it a fight about the hip pocket and not about the environment. That was brutal retail politics and it took Abbott about six months to cut through and, when he cut through, Gillard was gone.”
Bear in mind carbon pricing is actually the most economically efficient way to drive the transition to low emissions. Bear in mind “axe the tax” has destroyed the possibility of optimal policy.
Technology not taxes
Over time it became clear there was a cost to repealing – rising emissions and a dysfunctional energy market. Malcolm Turnbull tried to pivot out of the damage created by Abbott by creating a new policy mechanism called the national energy guarantee. But that effort blew up the Coalition. It was one of the factors that ended Turnbull’s prime ministership.
Morrison had to pick up the pieces during the last parliamentary term. Under pressure from progressive Liberal voters in the cities, as well as key international allies, particularly the US and the UK, Morrison came up with a brand new formulation for Coalition climate policy. Morrison now says the Coalition supports a transition to net zero emissions by 2050 and Australia will meet this target through technology, not taxes. He uses this formulation to contrast the Coalition’s approach with Labor’s.
There are a few things to say about this. The first is this is a manufactured fight about nothing. Nobody is proposing to drive the mid-century transition through a carbon tax, and everybody supports technology. Sticking with technology, the government bankrolls investments in technology like soil carbon and green hydrogen with your taxes. So understand: your taxes are bankrolling the Coalition’s technology “not taxes” policy.
Stop the boats
Another Abbott bequest, although Morrison operationalised this as immigration minister. These three words set the policy architecture and the social licence for Australia’s harsh deterrence policies. Stopping the boats is an article of faith for some Australian voters, even though no one breaks the law when they seek asylum in this country because Australia is a signatory to the refugee convention.
While the deterrence framework of boat turnbacks and offshore detention has been successful in stopping the blow of unauthorised boat arrivals to Australia, this elaborate apparatus comes at an enormous cost, both to the budget (around $1bn every year) and to the human beings languishing for years in offshore detention, or in extended limbo in Australia on temporary protection visas.
Stop the death tax
We can keep this one simple. Nobody actually proposed a death tax in 2019. But Liberals characterised Labor’s proposed changes to franking credits – an overhaul that would have delivered $11.4bn in revenue over the forward estimates – as a “retirement tax”. This description was widely used as shorthand in media coverage so a feedback loop developed that amplified the fake news circulating on social media platforms during the 2019 election.
Given the budget is now in deep deficit, any government examining that particular concession looks even more fiscally prudent now than it did back in 2019. But to be clear, Labor did not propose a death or retirement tax in 2019. But a lot of voters believed they were voting Liberal to stop one.
Mediscare
The prototype for the 2019 death tax offensive was Labor’s “Mediscare” campaign in 2016. A bit like the death tax, “Mediscare” was grounded in an actual proposal by the Coalition to examine outsourcing the payments system, which was given political potency by Abbott’s deeply unpopular 2014 budget, which contained cuts to health funding and GP copayments. Turnbull acknowledged this point when he talked after the election about Labor having “fertile ground in which that grotesque lie could be sown”.
While a whole election was fought around defending Medicare, big problems still remain, not the least of which is hospital funding. With the whole system stretched by the pandemic, the premiers are pushing for the commonwealth to pick up a larger share of the funding. All state and territory leaders have been pushing the federal government to permanently lift the commonwealth’s funding guarantee to a 50-50 funding split beyond June 2023 when the current arrangement ends. The cost to the commonwealth is estimated at about $5bn extra a year. But neither Morrison nor Anthony Albanese is showing much interest in that proposition.
