PETER VAN ONSELEN: Jim Chalmers blatantly lies to Australia and then lectures the country about ‘trust’. Here’s a truth bomb for you, Jim!

Labor rules something out before the election, wins, then discovers a year or two later that the very thing it said wouldn’t happen, and wouldn’t need to, suddenly does.

It’s getting tiring, but this is the pattern that Treasurer Jim Chalmers and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese continue to follow: making stupid promises and then blaming the voters (or the media) for expecting them to do what they promised.

The latest example is the government’s U-turn on abolishing negative gearing, which is widely expected to be one of the key points in next Tuesday’s Budget. Chalmers said this week he was “frank” with Australians that Labor was “coming to a different position” on the issue.

“Trust is built by making the right decisions for the right reasons and by explaining if you have come to a different position over time, by being honest and explaining why this is the case,” he claimed with a straight face.

There are real policy reasons to rethink negative gearing, and there have been for years. Housing affordability is an issue, and younger Australians are being left out of the market, while the tax system subsidizes leveraged property investments – and lots of them.

The case for reform is therefore very defensible.

But Labor did not say before the last election that it would scrutinize housing taxes. There was no mention that reforms might ultimately be necessary. It said the matter was closed, done and dusted, and no changes would be made.

In other words, it lied! Unless you’re naive enough to believe that Labor had no idea that it might have to revisit the issue after the election.

Labor rules something out before the election, wins, then discovers a year or two later that the very thing it said wouldn’t happen, and wouldn’t need to, suddenly does. That’s Treasurer Jim Chalmers’ playbook

Labour’s pre-election promise neutralized the Coalition, while Labor conducted effective scare campaigns about what the Coalition might do.

For Labour, it has reassured voters scarred by Bill Shorten’s 2019 reform agenda that it would not go anywhere near those ideas now.

It allowed Albo to present Labor as modest and non-threatening. Once the elections were won, the supposedly resolved issue became topical again.

We have now seen this script in both the 2022 and 2025 elections.

The third phase of tax cuts was the subject of 2022. Labor promised to keep them and redrew them after coming to power.

Retirement followed in the same way. Labor assured voters that there would be no immediate changes, and then taxed large balances more heavily. Surprise!

The policy argument for change on both counts has merit, as does the negative gearing.

But Labor wanted to present itself politically in one way before the election, before doing anything else afterwards. It was sneaky.

Albo and Jim’s cunning political tactics are obvious: lie and later tell how trustworthy they are

Is negative gearing fair? Does it worsen affordability? Should younger Australians subsidize tax breaks for older, wealthier property owners?

All legitimate questions. I only wish that we could have serious debates about such decisions in the run-up to the elections. Isn’t that how democracies should work?

Now we are forced to endure Jim Chalmers’s intolerable commentary that he withdrew simply because circumstances have changed, as if he would not have tolerated breaking election promises if it had not been absolutely necessary.

Voters are told to be adults. The media is being told to stop obsessing over broken promises. Oppositions are accused of bad faith when they publicize broken promises. The government, meanwhile, presents itself as pragmatic and courageous, and adapts bravely, while everyone else remains stuck in gotcha politics.

The adults in the room, if you will. Spare us the holiness and stop making promises you can’t keep!

Labor is unlikely to pay a price for yet another broken promise. The reversals are all carefully targeted.

The third phase of the income tax rewrite benefited many voters, and only high-income earners.

Super changes affect people with huge balances, not the mainstream. The negative debt reforms expected in next week’s Budget will hit investors more than renters or first home buyers.

The same goes for the expected reduction in capital gains tax benefits, although I honestly don’t recall Labor making a statement on a possible change.

It is a promise broken by calculation.

Sometimes circumstances change, usually politicians just say what they need to say to win elections. If they don’t want to be tricked by stupid promises, then stop making them.