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The Prime Minister’s guide to breaking promises responsibly, seriously and in the national interest.

Can you paper over broken election promises with a handful of focus-grouped slogans and the verbal equivalent of bubble wrap?

The PM seems to believe that you can.

Anthony “My Word Is My Bond, Terms and Conditions Apply” Albanese has armed Labor MPs with a list of approved responses for those awkward moments when voters ask why campaign promises now sit in the same graveyard as affordable housing and bulk billing.

The PM has broken his word on everything from energy policy to tax cuts.

And in last night’s budget, he was tipped to break his word on negative gearing as well as capital gains tax changes.

So how do Labor MPs defend the indefensible?

Here’s a list of talking points your local member has been issued by head office in the event voters dare to raise the small matter of truthfulness with them.

And no, this is not satire.

1. “The right decision is to do the right thing with the right policies at the right time.”

The assumption seems to be that if your local Labor MP says “right” often enough, you will enter a mild hypnotic trance and forget that “we absolutely won’t do this” has somehow become “history demanded it.”

It is a remarkable rhetorical achievement.

By this logic, a burglar caught climbing through your window need only explain that he made the right decision, in the right house, at the right time.

And who are you to question such moral precision?

2. “Any responsible government must take these issues seriously.”

In modern politics, honesty is optional. Gravitas is compulsory.

Labor heavyweights expect us to forgive the PM’s lies because they were told with a straight face.

Apparently, it doesn’t matter that he told us fairy tales to get elected; what counts is that he recited his fairy tales with the utmost seriousness.

3. “Young people and their parents and their grandparents are worried they will never own their own home.”

The genius here is that to question the government’s broken promise on capital gains tax becomes almost unseemly.

Do raise Labor’s backflip is not to debate economics, or even to question Labor’s honesty… it’s to stand in the way of grandchildren and their emotional wellbeing.

Labor would have you believe that yesterday’s “never” is today’s “responsible adjustment”.

It’s not breaking a promise.

It’s empathy.

Apparently.

4. “We have focused on housing supply, but it has become increasingly clear that we need to use every lever we can to get Australians into homes”

They didn’t break a promise, they pulled a lever.

It sounds industrious. And highly practical.

The beauty of “every lever” is that it requires no admission that earlier levers were explicitly declared off-limits.

5. “Intergenerational Fairness”

Sure, they’re breaking a promise, but that’s a small price to pay for correcting a grave historical wrong!

And who will dare to argue against fairness between generations?

The key is to revise promises made in the language of certainty to statements now made in the language of virtue.

Yesterday’s categorical “we will not” has become today’s “we must consider the burden on future Australians,” right before the policy lands squarely on the same future Australians.

It is not so much a justification as a linguistic sleight of hand: a slow-motion substitution where concrete commitments are quietly replaced with abstract ideals, until the original promise is no longer visible — only the moral fog that has taken its place.

And so it goes on.

A government that once spoke in the clean, declarative grammar of certainty now communicates in a softer dialect of adjustment, nuance and “context”.

Promises are no longer things you keep or break — they are things you reframe.

Preferably with accompanying adjectives like “responsible”, “fair”, or “necessary”, each one applied like a fresh coat of paint over a very old crack in the wall.

The result is a politics in which the original sentence is never quite withdrawn, only gently reinterpreted beyond recognition.

And if voters detect a certain gap between pre-election promises be post election behaviour, they are reassured that this is not inconsistency at all. It’s leadership.

The kind that looks suspiciously like saying one thing to get elected and another to stay there, while insisting the only thing that has changed is the weather.

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Republished with thanks to The James Macpherson Report. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.