As the Coalition reasserts “lower tax” as political identity and Labor rushes to deny the high-tax label, Australian politics is losing the language needed to fund shared purpose, rebuild trust and sustain public life.

The new Liberal leadership duo of Angus Taylor as Opposition Leader and Jane Hume as Deputy have launched with a familiar reflex: declare ’lower tax’ not merely a policy preference but an identity, an ‘instinct’, a brand marker to be repeated until it becomes common sense.

And Labor’s immediate answer has been to refuse, at almost any cost, to be cast as the ‘high tax party’: not ‘we’ll tax more to fund more’, but ‘we deliver tax cuts too – for everyone’. That positioning is explicit in Labor’s own messaging on ’new tax cuts for every taxpayer’ and in senior Labor voices framing Stage 3 changes as ‘income tax cuts for Australians’.

So we have a paradox – frankly, the cancer – at the heart of Australian politics in early 2026.

The Opposition says it must be the party of lower taxes. The Government says it’s delivering tax cuts to everyone. And the public realm keeps thinning out.

The Coalition’s ’lower-tax instincts’ are not an accident. They’re a survival strategy.

After the Coalition’s recent electoral trauma, Taylor is signalling a return to John Howard economic basics: tax, spending restraint, immigration pressure valves, red tape targets, and a promise to be the party of lower taxes again including arguing that higher taxes (eg, on capital gains) would reduce housing supply.

This is less a fresh program than a frame-lock: force every debate back to ’tax relief’, ‘waste’, and ‘big government’, because it keeps the Coalition’s coalition together – business constituencies, aspirational homeowners, anti-state media ecosystems – even if it struggles to speak to the country as it is now.

Labor’s response: ‘We’re not high tax; we’re the tax-cut government.’

Labor’s counter is to claim the tax relief mantle: defend the redesigned Stage 3 package as a fairer set of tax cuts, and advertise further rounds of tax cuts in 2026 and 2027 as proof the party cannot be credibly painted as high tax.

It is also to prosecute the political memory that the Coalition opposed Labor’s tax changes – a line already embedded in Labor attack framing and discussed in political coverage of Taylor’s leadership pitch.

In short: Labor is trying to deny the Coalition its most effective cultural weapon – the old story that the Liberals cut your tax and Labor raises it.

The deeper problem is the low-tax consensus quietly makes division worse.

Here is the civic cost of this choreography.

When both parties compete to look low tax, government loses the language and eventually the permission and capability to do the big, essential work that holds a society together:

• building social and affordable housing at scale;
• funding primary care and prevention to relieve hospital bottlenecks;
• climate adaptation (heat, floods, drought) as permanent infrastructure;
• public transport, local services, cultural institutions, libraries; and
• integrity systems that restore trust.

And when those things fray, people don’t merely get poorer – they get meaner, more anxious, more tribal. Division is not just culture war; it’s the social psychology of scarcity and perceived rigging.

This is why the obsession with not being framed as high tax can be politically understandable and civically disastrous.

Australia’s missing argument: taxation as the foundation of ‘we’.

If the aim is cohesion, then lower tax cannot be the automatic moral high ground. The moral high ground is fair contribution for shared capacity.

The alternative frame is not ‘higher tax’. It is:

• fair tax (close rorts; target rents/windfalls; enforce integrity);
• visible return (link revenue to homes, health access, cooling streets, schools, transport); and
• shared belonging (public goods that mix people across class, suburb, and identity).

Because the truth is simple: when we shrink the community chest, we don’t eliminate costs – we privatise them. They return as fees, waits, tolls, premiums, insecure rentals, and philanthropic begging bowls. That is how a society stops feeling like a shared project.

The political opening hiding in plain sight.

The Coalition will keep chanting ’lower tax’ because it’s the shortest path back to recognisable identity. Labor will keep insisting it’s not ‘high tax’ because it remembers the electoral bloodbath that follows that label.

But the country is now paying a price: a politics that talks relentlessly about tax as a burden, and almost never about tax as belonging.

A serious government and a serious opposition should be willing to say the heresy out loud:

Taxation is not the enemy of cohesion.

Unfair taxation and underfunded public life are.