There are two sorts of broken promises. Here is an example of each:
- I borrow $500 from you and promise I’ll pay it back next week even though I have no intention of paying it back and you deserve to lose your money for being such a fool as to lend it to me.
- I promised that I’d drive Barry to the airport this weekend but I don’t because he’s now in intensive care in a hospital and his trip has been cancelled.
In the latter case, I’m sure that keeping my promise is probably not something that I’ll be praised for.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m unhooking all these tubes so I can get Barry to the airport like I promised…”
“But he’ll die if you move him.”
“Sure, but a promise is a promise and I can’t let a little thing like his life stand in the way of me keeping my word!”
I’ll leave you to decide whether Labor’s broken promise on tax cuts is an example of the first one or the second one…
I do want to point out, however, that Labor went to the election promising not to make changes to the Stage 3 tax cuts. After the election they were often asked if that promise still stood to which the reply was always something like: “We have no plans to make changes,” or “We haven’t changed our position.”
Now that changes are proposed, these will be regarded as weasel words and, while it’s impossible to prove that they were always going to make the changes, the media is putting forward the idea that Labor promised on a number of occasions that there’d be no change even though all they said was that they had no plans to make changes. It may seem a pedantic point but anyone who listens to politicians of all persuasions should hear the silent “at this point” at the end of that statement.
Of course this begs the question: Why did journalists keep asking a question that had been answered hundreds of times?
If I were to give my answer to that question it would be that it was because just about everyone knew that the Stage 3 tax cuts were a silly idea because they were unaffordable, they were inflationary and they benefitted people who were already well off.
Naturally when I say “everybody” I don’t mean actually everybody. I just mean everybody who was part of the media group asking the question. After all, if you thought the tax cuts were just fine and dandy, why would presume that it was necessary to check with the government that they hadn’t changed their minds? Surely you’d be better off asking a question where you didn’t know that the answer would be: We haven’t changed our position on that.
If I were cynical, I might suggest that Labor were always going to find a way to tweak the tax cuts and that waiting until now and calling the MPs back early because something needs to be done about the cost of living “crisis” makes it easier to argue that they really didn’t have any plans and that it’s just something that happened… sort of like Barry’s accident… and it would be wrong to keep the promise and that it’s a sign of strength that they’re prepared to do the right thing even if it’s hard…
At what point did the cost of living become a “crisis”? It’s interesting. I mean we had a budget “crisis” when Australia’s debt blew out to almost $300 billion but then the Liberals were elected to fix things and it was no problem after that. It was no problem even when it grew to three times that.
Similarly, the cost of living and housing is always a crisis for the people who can’t afford to feed their families or put a roof over their heads. It’s interesting to try and work out at what point does this become the sort of problem that always has “crisis” attached to it when the media talks about it. Maybe it’s as soon as we’ve had a Labor government for more than two months…
So how will this broken promise/change of circumstances/help for struggling taxpayers play out?
Well, the Coalition will oppose any change, and The Greens will argue that the changes don’t go far enough. On past form, the Coalition will block it whatever, while The Greens will try and extract some change to make the point that there’s a point to them having a large number of Senators.
The Coalition will run hard on the idea that governments should never break promises and hope that nobody remembers that they promised to introduce a federal integrity commission which they argued that they couldn’t do because Labor didn’t agree with their proposed model, conveniently overlooking the fact that there are many things that they did without worrying whether Labor agreed or not. And they can hope that nobody will bring up the fact that they were the party that introduced the term “core and non-core promises” because it’s just so last century, like the “never, ever GST”…
If Labor can’t get the legislation through, it could be a trigger for a double dissolution down the road. While it seems unlikely that they’d want to go to an election on the basis of not being able to pass legislation that enabled them to break a promise, it’s hard to know how popular the proposed tax changes will be.
Personally, I suspect that a large number of people will decide that they only care about broken promises when it hits them personally and, while they’ll support the idea in principle that promises should be kept, they’ll agree that circumstances change and one of the things that helps them understand that is the idea that the change in circumstance is that they need the money more than someone earning more than they are… although it could be argued that that’s not really a change.
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