From Jessica Irvine today:
It’s difficult to turn on the TV or walk down the street these days without encountering cheery yellow ads welcoming one to the so-called “ideas boom”.
It’s all part of a $28 million taxpayer-funded campaign from the Prime Minister to get Aussies hip and happening with the digital age, ya dig?
But in stark contrast to the rhetoric, Turnbull’s true attitude to ideas generation in government has proved distinctly 20th century.
Having promised that everything was on the table, Turnbull has since closed the door on almost every type of major tax reform.
In the process, he appears to have snared Labor into a trap of its own making.
Taking it on good faith that Australia was about to embark on an open and mature debate about tax reform, and, indeed, believing the government was planning to increase the GST, Labor drew up a comprehensive suite of tax measures, including increasing taxes on cigarettes, multinational firms, superannuation and investment housing.
The response from the government has been swift, and merciless.
Take this from immigration minister Peter Dutton, who this week slammed Labor’s negative gearing changes on Radio 2SM: “I think the economy will come to a shuddering halt and I think the stock market will crash.”
And one gets the feeling he’s only getting started.
You’re far too cynical, Jessica, and have this backwards. It is not Labor that is wedged here it is the Coalition and it is obvious in your own analysis. It’s not Shorten’s “ideas boom” that’s gone bust, it’s Turnbull’s.
Thus it is Turnbull’s credibility that has taken the damage which is precisely what we’ve seen in the polls with the Coalition squandering an huge poll lead in record time.
Arriving on the heals of an epic trogolodyte, the new Coalition leader is only popular precisely because of his modernising “ideas boom”. As he swings to the most cynical fear-mongering campaign in political history he is only shoving himself further into a doom loop. Every blow in the polls will push Turnbull to raise the fear further and every terrible utterance will take him further from the Malcolm we all expected and loved, generating serious resentment at the betrayal.
The Coalition has put Turnbull’s imploding credibility at the heart of the election campaign and in so doing pushed Bill Shorten squarely into the position of national interest policy leadership thus resuscitating his previously inanimate credibility. Let’s not forget, either that, it was Shorten’s policy platform that did this to the Coalition not the other way around. Labor detected the Coalition schism and has exploited it fully with excellent policy in the national interest. That’s exemplary politics.
I don’t know if it’s enough for Labor to win but I can tell you they’re a much better chance today than one month ago.
