Why ScoMo Won

As my eight-year-old wrote on Friday, voters were being forced to make what should have been a simple choice. On the one hand was a party proposing to actively take away wealth from vast swathes of middle Australia through Labor’s tax-everything-that-moves platform and redistribute it to those Labor subjectively judged were more deserving.

Embedded within this bargain was the ask that the community should trust Labor to spend the money raised from all its new taxes wisely.

Setting aside Labor’s bad luck in presiding over the 1991 recession and the global financial crisis, the empirical fact is that they have had a long history of running up large budget deficits. It was asinine to think the community would buy the argument that Bill Shorten would manage their money better than they could.

On the other hand, you had Scott Morrison, whom this column described as that rare politician who relentlessly under-promises and over-delivers. He stopped the boats. He saved Australia’s AAA credit rating, sparing borrowers rate hikes. He put the budget back into surplus, after the biggest run of (mainly Labor) deficits in history. (It's currently in surplus on all measures on a rolling 12-month basis.)

And ScoMo has been serially underestimated all of his political life by colleagues and media experts...

The choice he came to the election with was brilliant in its elegant simplicity. In contrast to Labor, he was not going to take our wealth away on the basis he could spend it better than we can. On the contrary, he would reduce our taxes and leave us with more money. He just wanted to empower us to be the best versions of ourselves.

This column described it as a battle between Labor’s desire to regress winners to the mean, and socially engineer "equality of outcomes" by punishing the hardest workers in the community, and ScoMo’s vision of cultivating aspiration and "equality of opportunity".

Read the full column here.