Albanese must make clear roundtable is just the first step

A month after the election, Anthony Albanese gave a speech to the National Press Club. Eight days later, Jim Chalmers did the same. The two speeches were monologues, of course – but seemed to be in dialogue with each other. Albanese announced a roundtable at which the government would try to build support for economic reform, “to drive growth, boost productivity, strengthen the budget and secure the resilience of our economy”. Chalmers, speaking of that same roundtable, said – almost as though replying directly to the prime minister – “No sensible progress can be made on productivity, resilience or budget sustainability without proper consideration of more tax reform.”

So if we don’t see any tax reform coming directly out of this roundtable – which finally arrives this week – will the rest of us be justified in saying “no sensible progress” has been made?

The short answer is no – but with some important caveats.

Why shouldn’t the government be ridiculed if it fails to do much on tax this week? The answer lies in timing. Labor has been careful to keep its goals for the roundtable pretty broad. It has talked about building consensus and shaping long-term directions; it wants the event to “lead to” concrete actions, with ideas generated for the next three budgets.

All this can sound a bit of a damp squib – but there are good political reasons to proceed cautiously. It’s highly unlikely most voters are ready for a series of tax announcements. Remember that Labor, early in its first term, foreshadowed tough conversations with voters about precisely these topics: spending and taxing. We need more services, which means we need more tax, which is harder to get with an ageing population. The government knew those conversations needed time. In the end, though, it didn’t end up having them, for good reason: inflation made it a pretty stupid time to be asking people to pay more tax.

Now the government is having to start that process again. This time, that tax conversation has been reframed, to be about productivity. Productivity has been the government’s buzzword since election night. But in political terms, that’s no time at all. If anyone at the summit thinks “productivity” has penetrated the dinner table discussions of most families yet, they’re crazy.

That’s the argument for not acting straightaway. At the other end of the spectrum is the idea Labor will take only big changes – in particular on tax – to the next election. The prime minister has previously spoken of perhaps taking more of his universal childcare agenda to the next election. So you can imagine the government offering, at that poll, a new tax agenda alongside other changes – so that, say, higher taxes were balanced by better or cheaper services, such as childcare.

This approach would be consistent with past Labor policies to introduce universal care, such as Medicare and the NDIS, both of which came with levies attached. (The opposition says, “you don’t raise living standards by raising taxes”, which sounds like common sense until you remember Medicare did exactly that.)

This approach – taking changes to an election – is famously what John Howard did with the GST. But on this topic, I always keep in mind the arguments made for many years now by commentator Peter Brent. He argues most of the Hawke-Keating economic reforms were not brought to elections; ditto most of Howard’s changes. In New Zealand, meanwhile, the GST was introduced and then hiked twice without these changes featuring at elections. “In Australia, reforms are usually sprung on the voters, having gone unmentioned … They meet resistance but once they’ve been introduced people usually get used to them.” There is even some evidence this was the case with Labor’s carbon price.

As I pointed out recently, this is the model Albanese followed last term, with his changes to the stage 3 tax cuts. So there are good precedents for waiting either until the middle of the term or its end. But we shouldn’t let the government off the hook altogether.

First, we should note an emerging pattern. Labor’s broad argument for proceeding gradually has been that it needs several terms in power to embed changes. This may be reasonable. But it also means that we are always being asked for patience: don’t judge the government yet, we are told – wait and see. We are told much the same about other foreshadowed changes, such as fixing Scott Morrison’s university fees arrangements, which seems to be taking forever. Now we are being given the same message about the roundtable.

Second: if the government wants us to believe this is the start of a reform process, it needs to act like it. The roundtable may not be a chance to announce big changes. But it is absolutely a chance to start making clear to voters where it’s headed, to begin getting us used to the ideas it wants to pursue. That might mean defining problems in sharp specifics or beginning to talk clearly about difficult solutions.

With the emphasis on “clearly”. The government has two bad habits – safety blankets, of sorts. One is deploying bland management-speak. Voters’ ears won’t prick up if there are no real attempts to talk to them. The second is shutting down discussions. To condition voters to the prospect of change, discussions will have to be opened up and let run.

If, at the end of this roundtable, the government seems largely concerned with convincing us all that it has been a success, pointing to limited progress in predictable areas, then that will be a pretty good sign it hasn’t been one. But if, instead, the government’s actions make clear it is a first step – if we are all a little surprised at what we are being asked to think about – then it may turn out to have been a very useful exercise. Even then, though – and I apologise for this sentence – we will have to wait a while until we know.

Sean Kelly is author of The Game: A Portrait of Scott Morrison, a regular columnist and a former adviser to Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd.