Liberal frontbencher James Paterson says Coalition should not have opposed Labor's ‘meagre' tax cuts before election

News.com.au

2 days ago

Senior opposition frontbencher James Paterson has conceded the Coalition's immediate objection to Labor's $5-a-week tax cuts contributed to the opposition's blistering election result, stating that party 'unity' was put before 'robustly interrogating policy ideas'.
The $5-a-week tax cuts which come into effect from July 2026 were introduced by Jim Chalmers in the March federal budget.
While the 'meagre' measures were criticised for being untargeted, they were passed through parliament just before Anthony Albanese called the election and are set to come into effect from July 2026.
Speaking to Sky on Sunday, Senator Paterson conceded that the opposition should not have opposed the policy as it allowed Labor to claim that taxes would be higher under a Coalition.
'I don't think we should have opposed the government's tax cuts, as meagre and miserly as they were. In the core of the liberal party's DNA is lower taxes, and we should never oppose a tax cut,' he said.
'We should never allow the Labor Party as audacious a claim as it was to go to an election, to claim to be the party of lower taxes. The Liberal Party must always own the space of lower taxes, and under Ted O'Brien's role as Shadow Treasurer and me as shadow finance minister, that will be the case.'
Although Senator Paterson declined to say whether he had personally advocated for further tax relief, stating he didn't want to go into 'private conversations' had by the leadership group, he said he personally believed lower taxes are a core Liberal value.
Reflecting on the Coalition's thumping defeat that reduced its representation in the lower to house by 15 seats to 43, Senator Paterson also said that 'with the benefit of hindsight,' he believed the Coalition 'prized unity over robustly interrogating policy ideas'.
'I should have spoken up more. I should have pushed back more. I should have contested ideas more. I think all my colleagues in the parliamentary party have had that conclusion,' he said.
'Unity and discipline in politics is a critical feature of a successful political party, and we will need that in this parliamentary term, but it should never come at the expense of taking, of really contesting those ideas, of really robustly considering them, making sure that they are fit for public consumption, making sure that they contribute to the public, believing that we are ready to govern.'
Party pollster Freshwater also failed to identify the Liberal's poor performance in key seats like Banks, Hughes, Menzies, Sturt and Deakin which were all lost to Labor, Senator Paterson added.
He said that had the party been aware of the potential swings against the incumbent MPs, then opposition leader Peter Dutton would have spent more time campaigning in those vulnerable electorates.
'We particularly would have spent our resources differently, we wouldn't have had such an aggressive map going after safer Labor seats in the outer suburbs … had we known that we needed to be spending more to defend those seats of our own,' he said.
'You have to rely on polling for that kind of intelligence, and so that is a real problem, and I feel terribly sorry for my colleagues who are victims of that.'
As it stands the Coalition holds 43 of the 150 seats in the Lower House.
The Liberals are likely to gain the blue-ribbon Sydney seat of Bradfield.
The initial count revealed that Liberal candidate Gisele Kapterian had won the seat by a whisper-thin eight votes, however the slim margin triggered an automatic recount, with teal independent Nicolette Boele yet to concede the vote.