As the Coalition reasserts “lower tax” as political identity and Labor rushes to deny the high-tax label, Australian politics is losing the language needed to fund shared purpose, rebuild trust and sustain public life.

The new Liberal leadership duo of Angus Taylor as Opposition Leader and Jane Hume as Deputy have launched with a familiar reflex: declare ’lower tax’ not merely a policy preference but an identity, an ‘instinct’, a brand marker to be repeated until it becomes common sense.

And Labor’s immediate answer has been to refuse, at almost any cost, to be cast as the ‘high tax party’: not ‘we’ll tax more to fund more’, but ‘we deliver tax cuts too – for everyone’. That positioning is explicit in Labor’s own messaging on ’new tax cuts for every taxpayer’ and in senior Labor voices framing Stage 3 changes as ‘income tax cuts for Australians’.

So we have a paradox – frankly, the cancer – at the heart of Australian politics in early 2026.

The Opposition says it must be the party of lower taxes. The Government says it’s delivering tax cuts to everyone. And the public realm keeps thinning out.

The Coalition’s ’lower-tax instincts’ are not an accident. They’re a survival........

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