2 June 2026
Glenn
Welcome to another episode of Why Can’t They Just, a podcast about politics, policy and getting stuff done. I’m Glenn Davidson and I’m a member of the Labor Party.
Janaline
I’m Janaline Oh, I’m also a member of the Labor Party. I’m a former diplomat and a current climate, environment and anti-racism activist.
Luke
I’m Luke Robertson, I’m also a member of the Labor Party, and I’m a conservation biology and environmental policy student in Sydney.
Janaline
I’d like to acknowledge that we are all recording this on the unceded lands of First Nations people in Australia, recognising that sovereignty was never ceded, and to pay our respects to their Elders, past and present, and to any First Nations listeners that we have.
Glenn
Now let me set the scene for today by quoting the father of economics, Adam Smith, from 1776 when he said ‘the subjects of every state ought to contribute towards the support of the government as nearly as possible in proportion to their respective abilities.’
That seems to be a very timeless observation; it’s just as valid today as it was 250 years ago. My second quote is from someone more recent. See if you can pick who it is.
‘The current tax settings favour well off, established interests against those trying to get ahead. If you work hard to get ahead, you get hit hard. If you live off assets, you don’t.’ That comment was made by Tim Wilson, the Shadow Treasurer, in his book ‘The New Social Contract: Renewing the Liberal Vision for Australia’ 2020. It does beg the question why he’s saying something different these days.
Certainly there is a lot more to the 2026 Budget than just tax reform, and we will get to those aspects as well, but let’s start with tax.
Janaline, is this budget a triumph of policy over politics, or why couldn’t they just leave things as they were and avoid all the negative reaction?
Janaline
The reason I think they did the right thing in not leaving things as they were is there is far too much weight in the Australian taxation system on wages and not enough weight on wealth. In terms of global taxation systems, Australia is unusually dependent on income that hits wage earners hardest. Most wage earners are younger people, they are people without assets. I think it is entirely appropriate that this Budget is finally trying to rebalance that and actually look at taxing assets more. So that’s the reason I think they were right not to try to avoid the political fight. I am disappointed with the tenor and the scale of the political fight, but I’m not surprised, because evidently wealthy people are going to try not to pay tax on their assets, and they are going to come up with a million reasons that they shouldn’t be taxed on their assets. They work hard, absolutely, but so do wage earners. Wage earners also work hard and they don’t have that luxury of a 50% discount on their taxation liability.
Glenn
Yeah, so that’s an important point, because they seem to think that they’re taking all of the risk to make all that money and they should get generous, or more generous, tax treatment but really they should contribute to the system that allows them to make that money, you know, they, just as much as wage and salary earners rely on the infrastructure, the hospitals, the education system, that provides an economy that is as lucrative as what it is for them.
Luke, this Budget was supposed to be about creating opportunities and greater fairness for younger Australians. Do you think it’s resonating with young people?
Luke
I think the mileage certainly varies. I think it is definitely tied to what sort of media a lot of young people are consuming. I think again it goes back to the challenge of trying to squish down really complex policy into digestible soundbites and content. I think, a lot of people have been very pleased about it, but a lot of people I think have been expecting this and have been sort of begrudgingly going ‘oh finally they did something’. But I think it will only have a strong impact when we start seeing results eventuate. Because up until now, this is more of a gesture until people see the results from it and they think ‘wow, ok, this was a good idea’.
Glenn
Yes, because it doesn’t really come into effect for another twelve months or so, and then people that have got properties now will continue on with the current arrangements. That’s what the grandfathering is all about, and so it doesn’t really start to come into effect in reality until the middle of next year, although if you see some of the reporting, it’s about already a reaction in auctions and home sales and bank loans, some of which may be related to these announcements, some of which may be related to other trends that were already happening in the market and it’s not made any easier by all of the noise that’s going around the whole issue. And this silly 47% campaign that’s going on.
I started by asking Janaline whether this was a triumph of policy over politics, but from what I’m hearing and from what you’re saying and the communication issues there, the politics may still be winning a little bit. Do you have a view on that, Luke?
Luke
Yeah, absolutely, that’s a really good point. I think Labor perform best when they’ve got a fight to pick. So I think we’ve seen a lot of improved communication. But it looks like they didn’t expect the magnitude to which the backlash would occur, and where it would occur from. I don’t think they would have thought they would be so vulnerable on places like social media, like you mentioned the 47% campaign. And many people receive news from reductive Instagram reels or TikToks. There was one that did the rounds by Fairbairn Films, and they got the facts completely wrong in the video and I think the Housing Minister edited it in and said ‘this is actually correct’ but that doesn’t get the same cut through as the original did.
And again with the 47% campaign, the guy who’s running it, who used to be a United Australia candidate, said ‘yeah, 47% doesn’t apply to most people and it’s the highest rate’, but he literally said but people won’t listen if I don’t lie. So I think communication is absolutely essential and I think they’re really trying to work out how do we do these big changes in a fragmented media landscape?
I think people wrongly reminisce on the days of Hawke and Keating, where those sorts of communications could occur in one broadcast on the 6 o’clock news. Obviously I wasn’t there. But it’s so much harder to run the argument now, particularly when you’ve got to be fighting on so many fronts. But I think your assessment is correct, I don’t think the communication has been as good as one would hope or expect.
Janaline
Look, having said that, I’m going to bring us back to the policy here. I think the politics is important; the communications is important. There is a more fragmented landscape now, but even getting on the news has not necessarily helped reform to win. The great irony of the Australian media is that they constantly complain that political parties are too lame and they’re not ambitious enough and when are we going to see a proper reform policy? And the minute anybody presents a reform policy, they all pile in and slam it, and talk about how terrible it is. And find the five people who are going to be hurt by it. And of course there are always going to be losers, and this is the problem. But I do think, let’s look at the policy.
So the grandfathering of negative gearing. After about five or six years, negative geared properties go into positive gearing, because they have paid off enough of their loans that the income from the property is actually starting to be more than the losses. At which point, it stops being negatively geared. So the grandfathering is not a thing that says ‘oh, these old people who have properties are just going to be able to do this negative gearing forever on these properties’. Because those properties are probably going to become positive geared in a few years. So that’s one thing.
The second thing is, this idea that the CGT, the capital gains tax, 50% discount is going to stop people from investing in start-ups and small businesses, I think is actually grossly disingenuous. I would agree that in the tech sector, it is actually an issue, because they don’t have a lot of start-up costs, because if they’re basically software based, they probably don’t have to buy a huge amount of stuff. And a very predominant model in the tech sector is, you have a great idea, you develop this great app, this great service, and then you try to get yourself bought over by someone like Google or Meta or, you know, one of the big tech companies. That is a thing in the tech sector. In that case, when you are starting up, you probably are going to be influenced by the taxation that you’ll be liable for when you sell your business, because part of your purpose is to create a product that you can, in terms of your business, that you can then sell on.
Angus Taylor, yesterday in parliament, was asking about, you know, hairdressers, and small manufacturers and shop owners. People who start those businesses do not generally start them with a view to boosting the capital gains, and then selling the business. People who start those businesses generally do it because that’s what they want to do with their lives and that’s how they want to be earning their money. And maybe they set up a hairdresser or a tattoo parlour because they actually like cutting hair, and doing tattoos. So I think this whole idea that the only reason people are starting up businesses and taking those risks and working hard and doing that stuff is to sell the business, and therefore if you change the capital gains tax around that, then that will massively disadvantage them and make them not invest, I think is massively overblown, let’s put it that way.
The other point I would make is that for those businesses, and also for people who are buying shares, the value of that asset will have to have increased by twice the rate of inflation before they are negatively affected by the change in the capital gains tax arrangement because, up until that point, they will in some cases actually be better off then they would have if they were paying capital gains on 50% of whatever it is that their business has gained by.
So I think it is all deeply disingenuous, this idea that every single small business owner is somehow going to be worse off. I mean, the way that the media argument is running, it is almost like we didn’t tax any capital gains ever at all, and now we’re going to tax them. That is not true. What the government is trying to do is ensure that the gains from capital are taxed in a similar way to the gains from wages. This is about fairness for working people.
Glenn
It’s correcting a distortion that was introduced by Howard and Costello 20 years ago and has been there ever since. It’s not something that’s writ in stone. It’s also bringing us a bit more into line with what’s common practice elsewhere in the world. And the other important point we should make, just to lay down the marker, is that nobody pays 47% tax on all of their earnings. The only way you would be doing that, and I saw some numbers this week, would be if you were earning, just in like cash income, over $20,000 a week, that’s over a million dollars a year, and even then you wouldn’t be paying 47%, you’d be getting closer to it. So that is quite disingenuous.
Janaline
So I just wanted to say a thing about the part of the Budget that proposes to put a 30% tax on discretionary trusts. Now, for people who are unfamiliar with trusts, they are a vehicle by which you can pool your family income and then distribute it at the will of the trustee. Now it is essentially a tax avoidance method. So, tax avoidance as in tax minimisation through legal means, there is nothing illegal about this. But what it means is that people can be earning very very high incomes, they can have their trust earn the income, and then they can distribute it in a way to the lower earning members of their family such that they reduce the overall tax burden, sometimes very considerably.
Trusts are overwhelmingly used by wealthier people. There has been some discussion by various lobby groups to say a lot of small businesses use a trust structure for their business and not all of them are super wealthy. That is undoubtedly true, but overwhelmingly, the people who use trusts are wealthier people.
There seems to be this sort of implication that, just because you’re a small business, you shouldn’t have to pay tax. I fundamentally disagree with that. I would say, yes, we should recognise that small businesses do take risks. It is good to have enterprise. Having said that, the reward for taking that risk and having that enterprise is an uncapped potential future earning. Now, if you’re a wage earner, there is, inevitably, a limit to how much you’re ever going to be able to persuade your employer to pay you. If you’re a small business owner and you are really good, and your idea is really clever and your product is great, you could become a billionaire. There is no cap on your future earnings and that is the reward for your risk. It doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t have to pay tax. Now small businesses do enjoy a lot of exemptions to recognise that they are facing a lot more risk, and maybe there is a case for looking at the thresholds of what constitutes a small business. But I think the fundamental principle is that people should pay tax, and I think the fundamental principle of this Budget, which I strongly support, is that income generated from assets and wealth should be taxed at least as much as income generated from wages.
Glenn
Ah, now let’s have a bit of chat about productivity. Productivity is an important area of focus for the Budget. The OECD rate Australia’s productivity just ahead of the middle of the pack. We’re somewhere between 13th to 16th out of 38 countries. We’re behind most of Western Europe, Scandinavia and the US, but we’re broadly comparable with Canada, the UK, Italy and Spain. The RBA has identified lower growth in the amount of capital tools per worker we have as a core structural drag on our productivity. Other factors are our slower adoption of new technology, market power concentration in the hands of a small number of firms and business dynamism, and a structural shift to lower productivity services sectors. And we also have stronger incentives to invest in housing, as we were just talking about, instead of productive business ventures, as contributing factors to Australia’s productivity levels.
Now Janaline, former Prime Minister Paul Keating was very focused on Australia’s declining productivity in the 1990s. And he believed that productivity comes from structural reform. He went pretty hard at that aspect in his time, not just about working harder. Does this Budget make any progress towards boosting Australia’s productivity? Should it have done more?
Janaline
Yeah, I mean productivity is that tremendously bendy, difficult to pin down concept that everybody likes to talk about. I think Danielle Woods, the Chair of the Productivity Commission, calls it the speed limit on the economy. That if we can increase productivity, then everybody can have higher wages and better standards of living without fuelling inflation. And I guess that’s the key goal.
In terms of this budget, I honestly think a really big sleeper productivity measure has in fact been the shift in the weight of the taxation system from incomes to wealth. I think an even bigger productivity gain could potentially be had if we moved more towards consumption tax, in other words a rise in the GST. Now obviously, we’ve discussed in an earlier episode that the GST is regressive and so you would have to link that closely with a specific transfer for low income people to make sure that they didn’t lose out, but consumption taxes are very efficient, in the sense that they don’t tend to change economic activity. And they also cannot be avoided.
Having said that, I’m not criticising the government for not attempting that in this Budget, because I think what they have attempted is a very very big thing and we’ve seen that with the push back, so I think it is perfectly reasonable for a government to do one big controversial thing per budget, and not try to do everything, everywhere, all at once.
So on the expenditure side, I think the thing that is really important for productivity is the continued modernisation of the energy sector, the continuing shift towards renewable energy and the reduction in dependence on fossil fuels. We’ve seen the global geopolitical context has really highlighted the dangers of dependence on imported fossil fuels. I think the shift towards renewable energy will be a productivity boost, and we saw I think this week the market operator issued its default market guidance for energy prices and saw falls in quite a bit of eastern Australia because of the uptake of renewable energy. And quite honestly, anybody who knows anybody with a solar panel on their roof, particularly if they also have a battery, will say that they’re definitely paying less for their energy than they used to.
I think further productivity gains in the energy sector could be had with more focus on rolling out the benefits of that to people who don’t own their own single standing dwellings, to apartment dwellers and to renters, and I hope that’s on the government’s agenda.
I think some of the research and development tax incentives, some of the funding for further research and development, particularly the funding that’s already been committed, through a Future Made in Australia, to look at some of those new, clean energy technologies, is probably good.
I’m actually going to throw to Luke at this point, because I know he has some thoughts about science funding.
Luke
Yeah, the CSIRO and our universities are super super important at driving productivity, yet the gains that are made through the scientific agencies are undervalued, I think by both the government and the public. Their work isn’t just things like wifi or plastic bank notes. It also includes the super important nitty gritty work that keeps our economy moving. My favourite example of this is the role they have in protecting natural capital and ecosystem services, which are vital to sectors like agriculture, which is not just preventing novel diseases and invasive species but is also protecting existing life so that they can carry out their functions like pollination, seed dispersal and so on to aid heaps of industries, whether the industries know it or not.
I think as well the reforms made to streamline approvals with a more rigorous system is going to help speed up development of renewable energy projects. Being able to speed up these projects and get them out and functioning quicker is not just important for our own energy grid but of course it’s much more attractive as a business investment to go through these approvals quickly.
And I think that one bit that is not very flashy, that is super important, is Environment Information Australia, which is a database that will be created for environmental and ecological data as well as examples of where projects have been approved, when they haven’t, and being able to check when you have similar situation, and then determine whether you even try to get your project approved in the first place. One other thing is a new federal biodiversity assessment instrument that will be applied to assess all sites uniformly in a way that hasn’t been done before. So I think there’s some really positive things in these areas, both in terms of productivity as well as environmental protection, and I think it is really important that we do this in a way that we don’t have to sacrifice the environmental protections, but instead improve them while still having that productivity gain. In both areas I think there should always be more funding, not just because of the intrinsic value of life on our continent, but the way in which that life supports us. And with the impacts of climate change getting stronger every day, there’s certainly no better time.
Glenn
And I’d imagine that’s one of those particular issues that’s of real interest to Gen Z and all the younger generations, because they are the potential beneficiaries of that, so it’s not just about funding for housing and so on, it is about funding for things like science so that we are better placed going into the future.
Janaline, other aspects of productivity?
Janaline
Yeah, so I’m just going to add to that environment piece. I think Luke, you’re absolutely spot on when you identify the Environment Information Australia and the capacity for national environmental assets, which is a publicly available environmental database, that organisation is now empowered to establish, could potentially provide productivity gains, because what it means is that proponents looking to get an approval for a project can actually look through and see if there have been other similar projects that have done those environmental surveys in similar areas, or gather that data and that will save them the effort and the expense of having to collect it all again. So I think that is a potentially huge productivity gain.
One of the things that I’m hoping the government will start to focus on a little bit more, is a thing that was raised by the former Secretary for Prime Minister and Cabinet, former Secretary of the Treasury, Martin Parkinson, who did a review of the migration system, and identified that there are thousands of skilled migrants in Australia, who have come to Australia on skilled migrant visas, specifically to do particular types of work, that they have not been able to do because their qualifications have not been recognised. Now, I am 100% in favour of ensuring that anybody working in Australia in a skilled profession can demonstrate that they have the skills that they need to do whatever that work is. I am not in favour of having people with electrician qualifications or plumbing qualifications or medical qualifications or legal qualifications that are not up to Australian standards.
However, I also think there need to be better pathways for people who come in with that training from overseas to be able to upgrade their skills, or modify their skills, or gain the skills that they need to meet those Australian standards, including English language proficiency, within a reasonable time frame, so within months and not years, and for a reasonable cost, so not for tens of thousands of dollars. And that would unlock a massive amount of productivity, because at the moment, we have a very large number of highly skilled people who are working in very very low skilled jobs, who have skills in industries like engineering, like electricity, electrical trades, like construction, like town planning, that we are absolutely crying out for. And these people are here, they’re here legally, and they cannot get their skills recognised. So I would like to see the government develop a process and some sort of overarching, I guess, institutional oversight, that works with employers, unions, professionals and the government to find ways of recognising these skills in a timely and cost effective manner.
Another area where I think the government has acted to improve productivity is what they call the right to repair. Now this is a little bit arcane. So in the farming sector, let’s say, you buy a tractor from John Deere, a big US tractor company. Under the terms of that contract, your warranty on that tractor is voided unless you get a John Deere representative to fix everything that’s wrong with that tractor. So even if you have only a minor issue, your local tractor mechanic cannot come and fix that tractor without that warranty being voided. Instead, you will have to pay orders of magnitude more to get a John Deere representative out to fix that tractor. The government is now enshrining right to repair in legislation and, once that is fully implemented, those productivity gains should start to emerge. Because firstly, the farmer doesn’t have to pay so much money to get their tractor fixed. Secondly, those little businesses that are set up to fix tractors, will be able to grow and thrive and we can actually develop some innovation and real local skills and capability to do those repair jobs. So I think that’s a tremendously positive thing.
Glenn
Yes it is, and it does prevent a lot of waste. Now another big area, a big growth area, a big new area that we’re dealing with is the sort of whole issue of artificial intelligence. And that’s really something that’s going to be a major impact on younger people going forward. Luke, did you have some observations you’d like to share?
Luke
Yeah, I think there’s a lot of concern about the development of AI, and particularly data centres and I think there’s a reason to be very cautious there. I think there’s a lot of concern about how AI will impact jobs, as well the question of whether we allow data centres to exist, right? I don’t think that’s an investment we should be turning away, but we should be making them participate responsibly. And I think there’s been some good signs, coming from Canberra, about making sure that they contribute and use renewable energy if they want to participate. I do think Queensland said no, and that was in a National Cabinet meeting. And similar things about water use too, so I think people are quite sceptical about data centres.
In terms of the actual technology itself, I think there’s also a lot of concern. One that is already frightening people, particularly in certain spaces like finance and a lot of white collar industries is a lot of people are losing their jobs and going ‘crap, what do I do now? I’ve gone to university for this skill and the company no longer deems it valuable. And that’s really affecting people in places like computer science, in software engineering, as well as other things like being paralegals and sort of entry level white collar jobs that are now being given to AI. I believe, though, that we will only see this sort of fully eventuate once companies grapple with ‘right, how do we actually use this?’ I think there’s been a lot of over-correction where companies have just started sticking AI everywhere, not really thinking about ‘do we really need this, is it better to have a human do this job?’
At the same time as all that, there is a lot of cautious optimism because it is a really useful tool for a lot of fields. I think what is differentiating a lot of people who are currently employed in a lot fields is, rather than being impacted by AI, they choose to use it. Being able to efficiently integrate it into their workflow to do things like speeding up data analysis, and allowing it to do menial tasks that take a long time. In Australia, I think we’re lucky that we have a government that’s wanting to cautiously accept AI. I think Jim Chalmers said this in an interview with the Betoota Advocate, ironically, where we want the benefits of AI but we want to allow it to be a net positive to society, without having to take away from people. So I think making sure that AI is responsible and we ensure that companies, particularly with the infrastructure, have corporate responsibility so that they do not do anything perverse to the natural environment, as well as ensuring that we give enough protections to workers who may be impacted by this piece of technology, the power to still have mobility within their careers, and not completely lose out.
Janaline
So if I can just jump in here, I would add that every major technical, technological innovation has been disruptive to work. It has changed the way that people work, it’s changed the things that people do. People have lost their jobs, but in general many many more new jobs have been created that do things in different ways. When I was a graduate trainee in the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade in the early 90s, we had just phased out the DFAT typing pool. Now, those people, some of them left the service, others of them were retrained to do other administrative work, generally much more interesting than just typing other people’s handwriting. So the key for AI I think is to redesign jobs and not to scrap them. The key I think is to make sure that we manage the transition in a way that people do not lose in a significant way. So jobs are, as you say, redesigned, so you look at how do you incorporate AI and use it properly so that you’re not just replacing workers, you’re actually incorporating AI in a way that enhances the workers’ jobs by enabling them to focus on the things that humans are better at doing.
I think the Economist recently reported on a survey of businesses that had introduced AI and by and large, most of the managers said ‘oh, AI’s fantastic’, and most of the workers said ‘actually it’s a massive productivity loss because it produces all this slop and then I have to spend half the day fixing it’. So I think there is a real learning curve for businesses.
One of the things that is being discussed at the moment in the context of the Labor Party’s reform of its national platform is actually how to embed in the Labor platform a role for union consultation and a role for the mechanism by which you can ensure that these technologies are rolled out and adopted in a way that enhances people’s lives and enhances people’s jobs instead of destroying them.
Glenn
There’s so many important points to come out of that. You know, to think that it was only 30 something years ago that office automation was the next big thing. And of course the other thing for AI is the implication for education now, particularly children, where you know it’s very easy to just get the answers to every question, but if you don’t ask the right question that where you end up with the slop, so there’s the real challenge. How do you teach critical thinking so that people can ask the right questions and know whether they’re getting something valuable back, or whether it is just slop.
Now another aspect of the budget is the whole care and opportunity segment. Now Australia spends less on welfare, at around 17% of GDP compared with the OECD average of 21%. Our spending is generally more targeted as opposed to the OECD’s greater universality. Our system is highly progressive and generally results in good outcomes with less spending. Yet we still have unacceptable levels of social disadvantage and poverty in this country. Unemployment benefits are inadequate, housing affordability is still an issue, around one in seven Australians live in poverty. The system is complex and difficult to navigate and the number of so-called ‘working poor’ is increasing.
Janaline, the Albanese government often says one of its core values is ‘no-one held back and no-one left behind’, yet clearly some people are being left behind. Has this budget addressed this situation adequately? Why can’t they do more and and faster?
Janaline
So you can always do more, and you can always go faster. I think the Budget has very significant constraints. One of the really great things, and I hate to be so boring as to go back to the tax reforms, one of the great things about the tax reforms is that I’m hoping it lays the groundwork to generate the revenue that will be necessary to fund some of these investments in public services. And I know on a previous episode we talked about how in my view you should never talk about how governments raise revenue without also mentioning the reason that they raise revenue and that is exactly all of these bits of social spending that you refer to.
So in Australia we have Medicare, the public health system. The government has really focused on increasing bulk billing rates, which means essentially the government pays for your whole doctor’s visit, you don’t have to pay anything extra. The government has also looked at very significant reforms to the National Disability Insurance Scheme, and we could do a whole episode on that. The aged care reforms I think are also very important and I think a large part of that is about making sure that aged care funding is efficiently and effectively delivered. I think child care - universal child care is one of the things that Prime Minister Albanese has said he wants as his legacy. We probably should do a separate episode on each of these sectors, because each of them has really important issues to unpack.
And then finally back to the point that you initially raised about welfare and unemployment benefits, the Minister Amanda Rishworth was at the National Press Club today announcing some very significant reforms to the way in which unemployment benefits are delivered. Personally, I remember the old days when we had the the Commonwealth Employment Service, which was public servants delivering those jobs, matching people to employers. I think the government should seriously consider re-instating some form of public service jobs provider and job matching service, not necessarily to eradicate all of the private providers, but to provide a benchmark and a standard.
Glenn
Yeah I think that with all of that it’s important to realise that no-one held back and no-one left behind is a journey, not a state of being.
I think we’ve almost come to the end of talking about the 2026 Federal Budget. Would you like to wrap up, Janaline?
Janaline
Yeah look, at the risk of being boring and repetitive, I would really like to just emphasize how important I think this structural change in the shift between taxation of assets and taxation of wages potentially is. The Federal Opposition in its Budget Reply announced a policy to index tax brackets, so that instead of having what they call bracket creep, when your wages go up, you won’t necessarily go up into a higher tax bracket because that bracket will rise with inflation. That is completely uncosted, it would be extraordinarily unaffordable, but the government’s reforms in this Budget, to look at taxing wealth more and taxing income less, actually lays the potential foundations that might enable in future for indexation of tax brackets to become a reality. And the reason for that is because by ensuring wealth is taxed in a commensurate way with income, you actually start to generate more revenue from that side of the tax system, which means that you don’t need as much revenue from the wages side. And that’s where you could potentially contemplate, in the future, indexing tax brackets.
Glenn
Excellent. Now let’s have the last thought from you, Luke.
Luke
Taking on structural reform, especially with all this backlash, is never easy and the importance of these challenges, I think, is captured well in this speech that the Prime Minister gave last year.
‘We know that every generation understood that to fulfil their purpose, achieve their goals, give life to their values and keep faith with people and movement they serve, they had to be in government. Government is where you get things done. The Labor mission has never been a theoretical exercise or a rhetorical one. Our work is measured in deeds and it depends on delivery. On change our citizens can see. Tangible, practical outcomes that make a positive difference to people’s lives.’
I think that nicely encapsulates the necessity of confronting these challenges and making changes that do deliver tangible outcomes for the public, even if it is politically challenging.
Glenn
Yes, and the standard we should be holding them to, so thank you very much Luke, and thank you Janaline.
That wraps another episode of Why Can’t They Just? Our theme music for this podcast is a piece called Insurrection by Pierre Chrétien, performed by the Soul Jazz Orchestra, courtesy of Do Right Music Inc. I’m Glenn Davidson.
Luke
I’m Luke Robertson.
Janaline
I’m Janaline Oh, and this is Why Can’t They Just?