It’s Christmas Day for a columnist when a governing party reverses a decision for which you have previously given them a righteous bollocking. So HO HO HO to me, as this week brings the joyful tidings that the federal Labor caucus have put their Santa hats on and chosen to unstupid the planned “stage-three” tax cuts.

The scheduled cuts are a legacy of the Morrison Coalition government. They passed with qualified support from Labor and some of the crossbench, including Jacqui Lambie, back in 2019, back when Scott Morrison had improbably won an election and Labor, the Fates and the black stuff of the universal firmament did not, could not, work out why.

The cuts were Morrison’s signature policy, a scheduled flattening of the tax rate that represents a pure distillation of neoliberal Friedmanite economics, a mass injection to the principle of trickle-down capital flow or a raw, unadorned bias towards rich people … although I really shouldn’t restate the same thing three times.

Labor and crossbench intervention saw the initial package of cuts broken up into three tranches, with the fattest and juiciest of these – stage three, for those on an annual income of $200,000 plus – stalled until 1 July of this year.

The point was made at the time that the unnecessary several extra thousands of dollars that would be pumped into the plumpest Australian pay packets would come at a cost of $40bn of job-rich,........

© The Guardian