Albanese now has time to bring real change. So timing becomes critical

Sydney Morning Herald

a day ago

In the first session of question time this term, Anthony Albanese was asked whether the government was considering certain taxes. A small smile appeared briefly on the prime minister's face as he stepped up to deliver his answer. Then it vanished and he delivered his line, quiet and clear: 'I'll give a big tip to the member for Fairfax: the time to run a scare campaign is just before an election, not after one.'
It was a good line. The quiet confidence with which it was delivered left no doubt as to the government's ascendancy. It helped that, as others have noted, Albanese was right. The opposition's attempts to warn of new taxes fell flat. Most voters have just made their decision – based in part on what the government said it would do – and they aren't yet interested in speculations as to what it might do.
But Albanese's words contain a lesson for the government too. The prime minister was talking about a specific type of scare campaign – the rule-in-rule-out kind – where the subject is imagined dangers. But the lesson applies to scare campaigns of any stripe, including those about the impact of actual policies. A scare campaign won't work for a while now. This raises a question: what is the optimal timing in which the government might announce significant reform and make the case for it, safe in the knowledge that apocalyptic warnings will fall on deaf ears?
A clue as to the government's thinking might lie in the lessons of its first term. Most prime ministers get into habits. They find things that work and repeat them. The first year of the Albanese government was about setting a tone by delivering on election promises. That is what Albanese has said about the first year of this term, too. Most of the last year was about getting election-ready: troublesome policies sidelined, retail politics to the fore. No doubt that will be repeated.
This leaves the difficult middle: the period in which the trickiest feats were attempted. That second year was dominated by the campaign for the Indigenous voice to parliament and then by Albanese's decision to break a promise and change Scott Morrison's stage 3 tax cuts.
The fact those feats were attempted in the second year meant two things. First, that if the political impacts were bad for the government – frustration at a referendum loss, anger at a broken promise – there was another year in which those feelings might fade. (Though criticism of the government at the weekend's Garma Festival reminds us that the real impacts of the referendum loss will be felt for years; political impact is not the same thing as actual impact.)
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Just as significant was the fact that Albanese waited. For the tax cuts, this meant that the pressure built. Withstanding such pressure can be difficult, but it can also be immensely helpful: by the time a government acts, it can feel almost inevitable.
Then there was a final element of timing. The debate over those tax cuts had been going on for years before Albanese was elected. Pressure for change had been building all that time, not just for the period Labor was in government.