Saul Eslake

The first I've alluded to already is that a lot of the opposition to the government's proposed changes is coming from people who are affluent, who have access to public microphones, who are able to express a view that

this proposal is going to make me pay more tax and I don't want to pay more tax.

The second reason is, of course, that the government is breaking promises.

They promised before the 2022 election and the 2025 election that they wouldn't do these things and now they're doing it.

Now, clearly, people don't like the fact that governments do things that they have said they wouldn't do and Tony Abbott

John Howard, Julia Gillard, all paid a very high political price for saying they wouldn't do things and then doing them when they got into office.

People feel, you know, kind of that they've been misled or worse.

So that's the second thing.

The third thing is that in contrast to the tax reforms that were implemented in the mid-1980s by the Hawke government and in the late 1990s by John Howard and Peter Costello, the introduction of the GST and the like,

there were, in those occasions, extensive consultation and preparation processes.

On both occasions, people were able to respond and discuss that, and flaws in what the government was proposing were pointed out in the public debate and then were...

amended, that legislation was amended.

And in the case of the GST reforms that John Howard and Peter Costello introduced, they took them to an election, which they narrowly won so that they could claim they had an electoral mandate for that.

Whereas the government has, for presumably its own political reasons, decided not to go down that path and instead presented it as a kind of fait accompli.

You know, we're the government, we won the election, we're going to do these things.

And...

I guess as a fourth observation, I'd simply say that Bob Hawke and Paul Keating and John Howard and Peter Costello were very effective communicators, more effective communicators, more skilled in the arts of public persuasion than...

Anthony Albanese and Jim Chalmers are.

And of course, back in those days, communicating with a large proportion of the Australian population was much easier because there were fewer media outlets.

People used to watch the news, listen to the radio or read the newspapers.