In an exclusive interview with The Australian newspaper, Peter Dutton has revealed that he is, apparently, a Liberal. By Liberal, I mean what Australians have considered a Liberal to be since the efforts of the dries to reform the party to be one that believes in smaller government, rational economics, and individual freedom.

Dutton said, ‘Lower, simpler, fairer taxes are instinctive for me, and so is providing reward for effort and allowing people to keep more of their money.’

You may think that these beliefs are foundational for any member of the Liberal Party, which is supposed to be the party of lower taxes, smaller government, and more individual freedom. It is revealing that they need to be stated; it should be what anyone who has heard the words ‘Peter Dutton’ or ‘Liberal Party’ assumes is written on the box.

But the reality is that in recent years the Liberal Party has not been the party of smaller government or lower taxes. Since the end of Tony Abbott’s Prime Ministership, the Liberal Party has become more comfortable with larger government and less willing to tackle structural reforms. At their best they have been more interventionist. At their worst, seemingly Soviet.

The major policy announcement in Dutton’s interview is that a future Liberal government will implement automatic indexation of tax brackets to finally get rid of ‘bracket creep’, the insidious process of automatic tax increases that happens each year with inflation. (Malcolm Fraser, the Liberal Prime Minister from 1975-83 briefly introduced this indexation but later undid it.)

Dutton described bracket creep as ‘a killer in the economy’ that ‘stifles productivity and entrepreneurialism and hard work’. But fixing it would remain only an ‘aspiration’ of his government that would have to wait until ‘a time where the Budget can afford [it]’.

There are two problems with this statement which, taken together, could be not unfairly read as an admission that Dutton does not actually have any intention of scrapping bracket creep.

Firstly, if it is true that bracket creep ‘stifles productivity and entrepreneurialism and hard work’, then this is true right now and not just at some theoretical future date. Each day that bracket creep exists, the Australian economy is less productive and dynamic than it otherwise would be. The aim of a Liberal government should be to remove every single impediment to productivity and entrepreneurialism and hard work, and to do so as quickly as possible. Why would you choose to postpone the benefits these things bring? If you want to be stronger, you start lifting weights. Saying you will do so at some unknown date in the future does not help.

Secondly, and this is a perennial problem in politicians, the ‘Budget’ is simply a collection of choices of the government of the day. It is the expression of their policies and priorities. It is not out of their control. It is not something that happens to them. There is not a time ‘where the Budget can afford’ to do, or not do, anything. Blaming ‘the Budget’ for not being able to afford to stop automatically increasing income taxes each year (when we can apparently afford to subsidise fantasy industries and build an entirely new energy system from scratch and pay for anyone who wants a university education to get one and for retirees in multi-million dollar homes to receive a pension and for more than 600,000 people to be on the NDIS) is just a weaselly way of saying you do not want to stop automatically increasing income taxes each year.

The simpler, Gen Z friendly, way of saying this is captured in an expression popular on the internet: ‘If he wanted to, he would.’ If Peter Dutton wanted to end bracket creep, he would. True, he is not Prime Minister right now, and he cannot do it tomorrow. But he could at least announce that it will happen once he is. Instead, we are left with a vague expression of an ‘aspiration’ that may happen once the gracious boffins at Treasury deign to allow it.

The same principle applies to Anthony Albanese as Prime Minister, by the way. If Albanese wanted to make buying a house more affordable or reduce energy prices or cut taxes in a meaningful way, he would have done so already.

If Dutton really does believe in ‘lower, simpler, fairer taxes’ and ‘reward for effort and allowing people to keep more of their money’, then he should say this simply and unashamedly. The right way to announce his apparent policy of ending bracket creep would have been something like this: ‘We will end bracket creep effective 1 July 2025.’ And the press release would have gone out more than a month ago, when everyone was talking about it.

First published on Cian Hussey’s Substack. You can read it here.