The total dysfunction between Anthony Albanese and Jim Chalmers has been on full display in the past 24 hours and one or the other is clearly lying.
The issue is the claim and counterclaim as to when the Albanese Government decided to allow credit cards to continue to be used to pay the ATO and who is now taking the credit for the backflip.
Last Friday with much fanfare, Treasurer Chalmers announced the changes and deferral of the guillotine falling on small business cashflows until July 2027.
This had come after significant stonewalling from Government, lead masterfully by Andrew Charlton. But it was ultimately up to Chalmers to land the backflip.
On Tuesday night though, the Prime Minister boasted at a top end of town business event he alone had personally intervened to make the change following after messages to him from Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry chief executive Andrew McKellar.
To this point, the record was at least consistent.
Then on Wednesday morning, Chalmers openly contradicted Albanese and said in fact he’d been working on the backflip with the PM at least two days earlier.
One of the two men isn’t being truthful.
Either Albanese lied to the business event on Tuesday, or Chalmers has, by desperately trying to write himself back into the narrative through an exclusive to Samantha Maiden on news.com.au.
It’s a brutal and public display of the tension between the two. Albanese wants to claim credit for everything, sheet blame home to everyone else and can’t stand Chalmers looking like he’s had a win for once.
It’s also about the timing of Albanese’s boast. The rest of his speech to the business soiree was junk content and meaningless platitudes, wholly unremarkable. The boast was his headline.
Albanese, however, knew Chalmers was also giving a significant speech that night, to the left-wing Australia Institute, about how the left of politics should engage with empathy and understanding with those being drawn to the siren call of Pauline Hanson and One Nation.
Chalmers’ speech was made for headlines. It was a well-thought out piece of political analysis, but Albanese’s insecurity and jealousy of his much smarter Treasurer meant he had to blow up Chalmers’ coverage.
Albanese did the equivalent of a nude streak in the last over of a tight T20.
His boast was always going to get coverage and draw the attention away from the much more substantive contribution to the national political debate delivered by Chalmers.
Chalmers wasn’t bagging One Nation voters. He was laying out the intellectual framework for Labor to recapture the working class and those being crushed by Albanese’s cost-of-living crisis.
Albanese, by contrast, has single-handedly delivered Labor voters to One Nation by running a genuinely incompetent Government and telling lie after lie.
Voter disaffection with Albanese might have started with the Albanese Voice to Parliament, but it’s been given rocket fuel by Albanese’s failure on Bondi and more recent blatant mistruths.
Which is why the past 24 hours are so remarkable. Neither account can now be true.
Either Albanese lied at the dinner about the influence and timing of his single-handed intervention as he’s claimed, or it’s the Treasurer’s version that the shift was already in the works.
If Chalmers’ version of events is right, then Andrew Charlton must also know he was hung out to dry as he was backing in the changes as Chalmers claims he was working to unwind them.
There has already been plenty of briefing by disaffected MPs and ministers complaining of Chalmers’ poor performance and Albanese’s regular briefing against and knee-capping of his Treasurer.
The PM is clearly so insecure and jealous of Chalmers he couldn’t let him have even a brief moment in the intellectual sun with a plan to tackle One Nation.
Chalmers is under extreme pressure. His time remaining as Treasurer is a point of open speculation in Canberra. Chalmers knows the risk he’s taken by contradicting his PM.
With an economy in all sorts of trouble, the last thing Australian’s need is even more dysfunction at the top of this government.
Cameron Milner is a former Queensland Labor State secretary