It takes a special kind of dogmatism to blindly insist that $107 billion worth of new spending over the forward estimates must be disbursed as designed five years before, despite known equity problems and changed circumstances since.
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That is, before a global pandemic, before an election, and before an inflationary spiral would send interest rates and rents off in hot pursuit.
Now it must remain sacrosanct, unamendable even though governments are required to respond to national and international conditions as they arise?
The Morrison government itself adjusted the package more than once to meet its own political imperatives, desperate to survive the 2022 election.
A disinterested observer might wonder why, uniquely, such a massive poultice of yet-to-be surrendered Commonwealth funds should escape the usual tests as to bang for buck, fiscal affordability, and socio-economic concerns.
And wonder, too, why if the case for unpopular top-end tax relief was so pressing in July 2019, its delivery was punted almost two terms into the future?
But this is politics. A world where delivering a better deal for 84 per cent of taxpayers is, one might glean from much reporting, less significant than breaking a promise that should not have been made.
It doesn't help that the Prime Minister was standing by the Coalition's stage three tax cuts until a week ago.
After willingly embracing the rules of the game set by its conniving predecessor, Labor must therefore take its lumps.
The best it can hope for now is that the new formula sells itself.
It helps mightily that there are no actual losers - a person on $200,000 will still get a hefty tax reduction of $4529.
Pretty handy for the tiny percentage of earners in this bracket and yet by halving their projected $9075 benefit, someone on $70,000 a year (just above average weekly earnings) will get better than twice the tax relief they had coming.
In a serious discourse - that is, one concerned with the efficacy of policy rather than the superficiality of parliamentary punch-throwing - the pressure to undo the crudity of stage three would have come from a broad spectrum of voices outside the government.
From peak business bodies eager to free up hard-bitten consumers to spend, from the pipe-smoking broadsheet pontificators who invariably lecture Labor about fiscal rectitude, and from the print (and broadcast) tabloids.
It is their far more numerous audiences who stand to gain most from Labor's re-working.
Indeed, in a more constructive world, the case for adjustment to account for spirally housing costs in particular, might even come from the Coalition.
After all, Peter Dutton insisted again just recently that the party he leads no longer speaks for big-business and inner-city professionals but rather for working people in the suburbs, outer-suburbs and regions.
Presumably then, he will vote for this re-jigging?
Not so far. That no such public expectation weighs on the opposition reflects the disconnect between the core purpose of elected office, on the one hand, and the mediation of so-called "rational" political practice, on the other.
It is a disconnect that elevates game-playing and relieves players of the onus to seek cross-party compromise in the national interest.
None of which is to say that the broken promise narrative will just dissolve.
It matters what leaders commit to and will doubtless feature heavily from now on because Dutton and his media friends seemingly plan to relive the glories of Tony Abbott's aggressive oppositionism.
But this dynamic is neither as one-dimensional nor as one-sided as they hope.
Just as the original drawn-out stages of the Morrison government's package delayed the tricky part into the future and thus into the remit of a possible future Labor government, Albanese now has a trap of his own.
While Dutton remains wedded to his outrage over the PM's broken promise, he too will have to decide if he stands in the way of a not insignificant tax cut for earners up and down the scale.
Indeed, the very middle Australian voters who live in, say, Dunkley around Frankston in suburban Melbourne where a March 2 byelection looms. And Cook now too, courtesy of Morrison's resignation.
Hard heads in the Liberal party will likely be privately concluding that Labor's plan is actually better for their base especially now that the wealthier city jewels have been lost to the "teals".
Then there's the "weatherboard and iron" Nats as Barnaby Joyce characterised them.
How many plus-$200,000 constituents do they have out there in the regions?
Will Dutton really instruct his troops to vote against cash money from July going to struggling low and middle-income earners?
This invokes the bind Morrison put Labor in back in 2019 when he refused to separate the stages of his tax plan.
As leader, Albanese explicitly committed to honouring the legislated package.
"My word is my bond," he said over and over. It sounded even more personal than Howard's "never ever" GST, Gillard's "no carbon tax under the government I lead," and Abbott's "no cuts to health and education".
As one of the parliament's oldest hands, Albanese had a front-row seat to these backflips and their consequences. He would know there could be a personal cost.
But he has told colleagues while this will be a difficult fight, it is at least, "our fight".
A fight on the ground to assert Labor values, defend Labor policy. He seems to relish it.
- Mark Kenny is The Canberra Times' political analyst and a professor at the ANU's Australian Studies Institute. He hosts the Democracy Sausage podcast.
Mark Kenny
Mark Kenny is The Canberra Times' political analyst and a professor at the ANU's Australian Studies Institute. He hosts the Democracy Sausage podcast. He writes a column every Sunday.
Mark Kenny is The Canberra Times' political analyst and a professor at the ANU's Australian Studies Institute. He hosts the Democracy Sausage podcast. He writes a column every Sunday.
