Labor’s promise to ease living costs and cut taxes may offer relief, but it avoids the deeper question of who owns, controls and profits from the systems making life insecure.

Last week Anthony Albanese opened Labor’s fiftieth National Conference with two promises that now sit at the centre of the party’s electoral offer: Labor will ease the cost of living, and Labor will cut taxes again.

Both propositions sound attractive. Both respond to genuine pressures. Neither is remotely adequate to the conditions confronting Australia.

Together, they reveal how far Labor’s political ambition has contracted. A movement created to change the distribution of economic power now offers to compensate people for its consequences. A party that once built public institutions now increasingly promises to leave a little more money in private pockets so households can struggle through increasingly expensive private markets.

Labor’s cost-of-living politics begins from the wrong question.

It asks how government can help people pay their electricity bill, rent, mortgage, childcare fees, insurance premiums, medical costs and transport expenses. It does not ask why so many essentials have become vehicles for profit extraction, speculation and corporate power.

“Cost of living” is therefore not merely an innocent description of hardship. It is a politically convenient way of depoliticising it.

Housing becomes a cost-of-living problem rather than the consequence of treating land and shelter as financial assets. Energy becomes a bill problem rather than the outcome of privatisation, market design and fossil-fuel power. Food prices become an inflation problem rather than a question of supermarket concentration. Insecure employment becomes household stress rather than a shift of risk from........

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