The fallout within the Coalition over Saturday’s poor election result rolls-on, with a ‘rising star’ of the Liberal Party and member for the seat of Canning, Andrew Hastie, criticising policies such as the company tax cut and the ‘innovation agenda’ because they had little relevance to ordinary Australians. From The Australian:
Mr Hastie said he realised something was wrong with the Liberal campaign when he struggled to answer a middle-income father’s questions about how the government’s policies would help his family.
“It was at that point I realised that a lot of what we were campaigning on nationally just wasn’t resonating with everyday Australians”…
“(The father) couldn’t understand the reason for company tax cuts; he wasn’t earning enough to benefit from the increased tax thresholds and he wasn’t an innovator — he was just an everyday Australian who was trying to pay down his mortgage and look after his children and ensure they had a brighter future”…
Mr Hastie’s remarks come after Liberal senator David Johnston, who concedes he is unlikely to be returned to the Senate, unleashed on his party as being “light years away” from relating to voters.
It’s a theme that has been picked-up by Greg Jericho, who noted the following in The Drum:
Among the biggest lessons of this campaign is that basing your entire campaign on the budget is stupid, and having that budget’s big ticket item be a company tax is just stupid repeated…
The sales pitch for the company tax cut was itself a classic of the neo-liberal-macroeconomic-trumps-all genre. There was talk about GDP and GNI improvement, foreign investment, productivity improvements and then employment and wages growth.
Well, sort of.
The Government’s own modelling to support the company tax cut revealed that were the rate to be cut to 25 per cent, then employment in the long-run would be improved by (drum roll) 0.1 per cent.
What a shock voters didn’t take to the streets in celebration…
Being told that giving a tax cut to someone else will eventually flow through to more income for you requires voters to have a lot of faith…
The ALP’s “Mediscare” didn’t work because it was a good lie and people are stupid, but because throughout the existence of Medicare the LNP has struggled to convince voters they value it…
And Australians love our health system, and care deeply about it.
Arguing to gift tens-of-billions of dollars of taxpayer money to foreign owners/shareholders, in the belief that it would magically lead to a slew of new investment and jobs, was never going to resonate with the Australian people, who care about everyday issues that affect them directly.
It was not just spurious trickle-down economics, but dumb politics as well.
