Labor may hope tax cuts soothe angry voters. They’ll help, but won’t be enough

October 19, 2026 — 4:00am

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After Labor won government in 2022, a shout went up from various left-wing groups. When, they asked, would Labor come to its senses and realise it needed to break its promise to deliver Scott Morrison’s stage 3 tax cuts?

After all, they said, think of what that money could be spent on. Free dental care, tackling poverty by boosting JobSeeker, universal childcare, public housing, superannuation on paid parental leave – the list went on. Of course, not all of these could be funded by this one change. Nonetheless, Labor’s failure to change the tax cuts became a proxy for everything it had not yet done.

In the second year of their first term, Anthony Albanese and Jim Chalmers broke the promise and killed Morrison’s plan off. A handful of those spending demands have by now been met, such as superannuation on paid parental leave. Most of that wishlist, though, remains unfulfilled. There are two broad reasons. The first is that spending pressures on government these days are immense, a fact underlined – yet again – by the recent release of the federal government’s Intergenerational Report, with its focus on our ageing population.

The second is that Labor didn’t just scrap those tax cuts, immensely generous to the rich. It restructured them. There were still tax cuts, only they were weighted more towards the other end of the income spectrum. That meant the cost was roughly the same – with no........

© Brisbane Times