Here’s a great example of why the Albanese Labor government won’t retain its majority after the next election — and is looking more and more likely to lose outright.
Yesterday the Commonwealth Bank — which made nearly $10 billion in profit in 2023-24 — announced it would slap a new $3 charge on customers withdrawing cash from branches, as opposed to automatic teller machines. It’ll be a nice little earner from people who can’t use ATMs for whatever reason (like needing a withdrawal bigger than $1,000), charging them to access their own loans to the CBA.
Given the single biggest reason the government is struggling is cost of living perceptions, here was a golden opportunity for Labor to demonstrate that it not merely gets what is upsetting voters but is prepared to do something about it.
It could have threatened the CBA with regulation or higher taxes, or ban it from tendering for Australian Office of Financial Management contracts. Australian banks benefit from massive government protection in the form of competition safeguards and market awareness that the federal government will never let them fail.
A blunt statement that the charge would not be tolerated would have signalled the government was prepared to use its power for the benefit of voters, not corporations trying to take money from them. Instead, Labor’s Assistant Treasurer Stephen Jones offered a limp call for the CBA “to rethink this terrible decision”.
“This is a kick in the guts for ordinary Australians and the worst Christmas present imaginable,” he said, thereby inviting voters to wonder why he was merely standing by and politely asking the CBA to stop kicking them in the guts.
Jones and Treasurer Jim Chalmers seemed more interested yesterday in boasting of how they were regulating spam texts and creating a “fit-for-purpose digital asset regulatory regime” (a subject of interest only to crypto bros and Senator Andrew Bragg) than in taking advantage of an opportunity to demonstrably align themselves with voters’ interests.
There could be no more elegant demonstration of how Labor is misaligned from the current political moment. It is still focused on being a manager of neoliberalism, tweaking regulatory frameworks to deliver more efficient market outcomes, rather than intervening forcefully on the side of voters. If the Prime Minister’s Office had some basic smarts, it would have seen the CBA announcement for the opportunity it was, called Chalmers and Jones and told them to launch a full-court press on the bank. The crypto bro drivel could have waited a day.
The same policy obtuseness is reflected in Labor embracing competition policy reform — commendably — but refusing to even countenance the simplest and best competition tool, divestiture powers, because, well, Bran Black from the Business Council might do yet another Sky News interview heaping shit on Labor.
Perhaps one day the penny will drop within Labor that it’s the only one playing the neoliberal game anymore.
The Coalition, under new Queensland management, has abandoned free markets and small governments. It wants to break up big corporations and expand the federal government into a whole vast new industry. The Business Council is an incompetent lobby group of multinationals fixated on lower company taxes and fewer rights for workers, with an abiding hatred of competition and social spending.
The Financial Review and The Australian will never give Labor credit for adhering to the neoliberal rules — they are partisan outlets that obsessively despise Labor and trade unions. Plus the AFR is dedicated to maximising shareholder returns at the expense of ordinary Australians (if we had a rerun now of the 1980s Hawke-Keating era, the AFR would be editorialising about unions having too much power, while The Australian would be savaging the “elite, out-of-touch globalist agenda” behind market reforms).
Voters know perfectly well the role large corporations play in ripping them off. But Labor sits on the sidelines, worried about whom it might upset if it intervenes.
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