CAMERON MILNER: Inept shadow treasurer Angus Taylor is Labor’s greatest campaign blessing

A week down and it’s a week closer for Anthony Albanese to get a second term in office.

The Liberals seem stuck in second gear and fail to understand if they are going to run a negative campaign around the question of “are you better off than three years ago?”, voters also need to know the Liberals are the answer.

The Liberals so far have failed to give a cogent reason to voters that they have any better plan than Albanese for a way back to prosperity and low inflation for our nation.

Voters are rightly asking: if we are getting the nation back on track, where’s the track leading?

Treasurer Jim Chalmers deserves credit — that Albanese will never concede give him — for putting Labor back in an election-winning position by the masterstroke of delivering a very modest tax cut to all Australians.

It might be only $5 but that’s money punters get to spend, rather than Albo gets to waste every week. The genius of the move though was to rope-a-dope that servant of the Labor campaign, shadow treasurer Angus Taylor, into saying not only did the Liberals oppose the cut, they’d move to repeal it!

Taylor clearly forgot that tax cuts — and therefore his own tax increase on every Australian — need to pass the Senate where the Liberals don’t have the numbers and won’t in the next term of Parliament.

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s fuel tax cut is perfectly placed for the battleground middle and outer suburbs which will decide this election and also the tradies who drive the small business sector of our nation.

But into the midst of this announcement stumbled Taylor, with his ideological idiocy of wanting to make the Liberals the party of higher personal taxes. His political ineptness is made all the more pronounced by Chalmers’ political genius.

Recent polls show that the fuel tax cut runs equal to Chalmers’ tax cut and therefore should neutralise the Liberals’ advantage.

The only possible way for the Liberals to recover is to announce a larger tax cut in the remainder of this campaign, but they are fast running out of time for this.

What Taylor has completely missed is that voters don’t want less money in their own pockets. COVID’s lesson is people love subsidies and love working from home. They regard “fiscal rectitude” as an uncomfortable medical condition. Ideology is just last year and deficits as far as the eye can see is about voters having access to even more handouts.

These lessons came from a Liberal government that smashed Howard and Costello’s economic legacy, even after the lockdowns had passed and the economy was back on track.

The Liberals look rudderless and there’s just too much second guessing.

The latest back flip on public servants working from home and that the necessary culling of excess capacity in the public service will now be left to natural attrition shows the Liberals are cracking under the pressure of the campaign.

The only thing being put back on track by the Liberals is the gravy train of Canberra public servants.

Women hadn’t changed their vote on Dutton because of the public service cuts, but because having been invited on a date with Dutton on the promise of cost-of-living relief, the bloke has turned up with no plans for later and is now asking them to split the bill for dinner.

The Liberals have talked a big game on cost of living, but they were always going to be asked to show how they could do better than Albo. To date, Taylor has failed to deliver and has committed acts of political self harm that are affecting their entire campaign.

And as for the Liberals’ own answer to Elon Musk’s DOGE agenda, Senator Jacinta Price must be asking why she was even given a role to cut waste.

Albanese must be pinching himself that the Liberals could be so bad after so ruthlessly necking his Voice referendum.

Add to this that the PM has had his best campaign week since being laid up on a couch with COVID with only Toto for comfort.

Albanese is a confidence player. When his numbers are up he’s all in, grinning his way to victory. When they are down he’s Mr Grumpy on the train to funky town. His sulks and blaming of staff for his weakness are Canberra legend.

Albanese has also been gifted the Trump tariffs that have papered over his campaign mistakes, distracted from his snarkiness with the travelling press pack and sucked the oxygen from the cost-of-living referendum this election could’ve become.

Dutton has a proven political instinct. He seems enfeebled by too much advice and needs to own that being strong comes with being direct.

He needs to stoke the boiler of the Dutton express, release the brakes and cut loose the passengers and the lose the Taylor caboose.

Despite the polls, Albanese isn’t winning any seats off the Liberals to offset direct losses in NSW and Victoria.

Amelia Hamer is beating Monique Ryan in Kooyong. Tim Wilson likewise with Zoe Daniels in Goldstein. There will be fewer Greens and teals for Albo to form minority government with after the election.

Voters crushed by Albo’s cost-of-living crisis are crying out for a promise of hope. They all know how bad it’s been, they just want to know Dutton has a credible plan to make their lives easier than they are under Albanese.

The fuel tax cut is solid campaign policy, as is cutting migration to allow more Aussies buy or rent a home. Taylor needs to be gagged and locked away while the very talented Jane Hume delivers a plan with a decent tax cut for all.

Then and only then will Albanese feel the campaign pressure of his cost-of-living crisis he’s presided over for the last three years and receive the judgment of long-suffering voters.