The Mike Hosking Breakfast

Mike's Minute: Aussie Labor have shown NZ Labour what not to do

21 May 2026

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Another lesson for our Labour Party if they want to ponder it. Australia’s Labor have blown their Budget. It's hard to overstate the anger and pushback on their tax changes made now well over a week ago. Budgets and their news cycle tend to come and go. This was different. It was billed as generational. It was seen as transformational and it was seen as Albanese having to spend a decent chunk of political capital, given his tax treatment was based on a lie. He said in the election campaign of last year that he would not touch tax. 12 months on, he went back on his word. The twist being the blowback came, and it hasn’t stopped coming, and somewhere in the past few days the concern, followed fairly quickly by panic, started to set in at Government level. The anger has not been driven by rich, white, old coalition blokes whose myriad of investments would end up being taxed more. It's been driven by young Australians who buy shares to save for retirement. Young Australians who start businesses to set up a decent life for themselves and their families. People the Labor Government never saw coming. What it shows, and it's an encouraging sign and one I suspect is as relevant here as it is there, is that a decent chunk of our population are not the moaners you hear on the news. They're not the NGO's bleating about their lot. They're not the success haters that dominate the news cycle. Rather, they're middle-of-the-road Kiwis and Australians who are quite keen on working hard and getting ahead in life. All they have ever asked for is, to use the vernacular, is "a fair suck of the sav". You don’t tax success and that’s what Albanese has had a crack at. Why take a risk in starting a business if all there is at the end of it is Jim Chalmers and his tax department looking to extract ever larger amounts of your hard earned? That’s what Labour wants to do here. It's always about more tax. It's never about more success, or larger growth, or bigger pie. Got an issue? Short of dough? Tax someone. Well, middle Australia isn't interested and they have been out in force showing it. Maybe Albanese knew that. Maybe that’s why he lied to get into power so he could do what he's done. If that's true then Hipkins is in real trouble, because he hasn’t lied. He's told you it's coming. And if we are like Australia, it's not going to go down well. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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