Karen Middleton

It needs to do something to fix a broken tax system.

And those are people who don't want to wait till the next election to

to have the government come up with an idea and then get it endorsed.

They say that's too slow.

Those people are putting pressure on the government now to do something.

And then you've got the people who quite rightly say, this is a broken promise.

It's an egregious broken promise.

They said they wouldn't do it.

I believe them.

And this is a breach of trust.

And the government is choosing to act on the first lot of people's demands and thinks that it can manage the second lot.

And it's interesting because I think

because of the size of their majority that the number of seats they won at the election a lot of people are telling you know focus groups social researchers pollsters that they sort of were surprised by the size of the majority the government got and that it now has the opportunity to do something like a once in a generation thing because of that majority and it should act fast so in some ways the old rules or the the standard rules of don't break a promise uh the

get flexibly interpreted even by voters I think when they decide that there's something that warrants doing something about it right now and that is what the government is looking to and pointing to in its decision to break the promise and make these changes.

That is the risk, you know, what's the old saying about you can't please all the people all the time but you try to please some of the people some of the time and the risk is that you upset all of the people all at once and that's what the government will be hoping that it isn't doing.

Music

I guess it depends on how effective its explanation is and how people receive that, whether they decide that this is an important move to fix the system, whether they accept that there has to be a transition which entrenches some of that unfairness for a while, or whether they think it doesn't go far enough and punish the government accordingly.

Yeah, so there's been some speculation in the last week or so that there might be some kind of extra tax measure and we have in fact seen that in the budget tonight.

It's called a Working Australians Tax Offset of $250.

It doesn't come in until the second half of 2027, and it won't be claimable until the end of that tax year.