Bill Shorten has told the party faithful at the Victorian state Labor conference that he remains fully focused on winning the next federal election, and declared “there is not a shred of complacency in me”.
The Labor leader’s address to the party conference on Sunday, which warned colleagues there was a “tough fight” ahead at the next election, comes at the Turnbull government has leapt on divisions between Shorten and prominent leftwing frontbencher Anthony Albanese.
The manager of government business, Christopher Pyne, contended on Sunday that Albanese was “trailing his coat, as they say, to see what kind of support he gets” after the Labor frontbencher used the opportunity of a post-budget speech in Perth to differentiate himself from Shorten.
Albanese said last week that Labor, rather than going negative, needed to accept the government’s “rhetorical conversion and triple our pressure for investment, while continuing to argue the case for further progressive reform.”
The public product differentiation by Albanese follows his earlier sharply critical commentary of Labor’s ill-fated Employ Australians First television ad, and it comes in the context of internal concerns about Labor’s rapid-fire decision in budget week to give only partial support to the Turnbull government’s proposed 0.5% Medicare levy hike.
The government wants the Medicare levy increase to apply to taxpayers once they earn over $21,000 but Labor resolved to support the increase in the levy only for the top two tax brackets, for people on incomes over $87,000 – a decision that costs $400m over the forward estimates.
The decision divided the Labor leadership group. The issue did not go to shadow cabinet, and some Labor figures are concerned the proposal costs too much, thereby crowding out other priorities, and offends against the universality of the Medicare levy.
With federal parliament set to resume for a sitting fortnight, Shorten moved on Sunday to shrug off the controversy.
The Labor leader said the government’s budget, which has been portrayed in some quarters as a “Labor-lite” budget, was “unfair to its core.”
“It is unfair when you have got stagnant wages growth, yet income taxes are going up for working class people,” Shorten told Sunday’s conference.
“It is unfair when corporations get $65bn in handouts, yet we see cuts to training and Tafe.”
“It is unfair when we see education and schools reduced by $22bn, yet this is a government who is willing to give millionaires a 2% tax reduction from 1 July this year.”
Shorten said the government was more than welcome to pick up Labor’s policies and ideas in an effort to move back to the political centre, but the government needed to pick up the whole agenda, not just some of it.
“We offer Malcolm Turnbull this invitation this Sunday morning: he can take our ideas – just take all of them. Don’t just cherry-pick some of them.”
Shorten said if the government wanted to shift the national political fight to questions of fairness, “we know every blade of grass on that ground.”
“We helped build that ground,” the Labor leader said.
“We are the party of fairness and we will never surrender the fight for fairness – and it starts again tomorrow in parliament and it’ll be every day until the election.”
In a coded pitch for unity, the Labor leader warned his audience the opposition faced a “tough fight” to win the next election. “We can take nothing for granted and we cannot afford to be complacent.”
