Ian Warden | Anthony Albanese's super tax not so super

The bones of this columnist's buried socialist (let us call him Karl, after a famous German philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist and socialist revolutionary) are audibly rattling and clicking now.

His skeleton jives with rage over the news that the government wants to make only slight changes to the superannuation tax concessions given to what the government is calling "high net-worth individuals".

Karl, seething, prefers to refer to these high net-worth individuals as "the filthy rich".

The government plans to cap the 15 per cent tax concession on superannuation earnings at $3 million from mid-2025, with earnings on balances above that amount (Karl is calling it "that obscene amount") to be taxed at 30 per cent.

As I write what the government is calling these "modest" changes (Karl snarls they are not modest but "gutless") is the hottest thing in the Australian public conversation.

An aghast-sounding Coalition (some of its expressed horror plainly faked and simulated) is vowing to fight for the rights of the cruelly affected members of the $3 million club (whose average account is in fact $5.8 million, with several of them having accounts exceeding $100 million).

The Coalition wants them, the sleek, concession-enriched millionaires, to be able to continue to wallow in the deep golden filth (the glorious mud of the lurks of the superannuation tax concessions) to which they have become accustomed.

What is causing Karl and this columnist special distress in all this (for on this issue he and I are as one) is that the shy, effete, changing-very-little changes proposed come from a Labor government.

Karl and I, in our hopeless idealism, used to dare to dream that Labor governments offered promise of socialism-tinted reforms that would make Australia a better, more decent and just, more equalitarian place. We thought we saw tantalising glimpses of what might be in the fleeting, pulse-quickening Whitlam years.

But no. Australian Labor governments always dash our radical, reformist expectations to smithereens.

So for example in the matter of the obscene existing super tax concessions Karl had dared to dream Labor's tax concession cap would come at $500,000, at the most.

This columnist, no longer nearly so fiery as Karl, had imagined it at a still voluptuous $1.5 million. A $1.5 million cap, while no longer rubbing the tummies of the filthy rich, would still pat the backs of the grimily well-to-do.

As one uses the figurative dustpan and brush to gather up and throw away the sad smithereens of this latest round of dashed expectations of a Labor government one wonders for the zillionth time what, if anything, differs a typical stand-for-nothing ALP government from a typically Coalition one? Between them these two Tory capitalist cults offer the left-idealists among us nothing but 50 shades of disappointment.

I am painfully aware of how time has changed me from the Marxistly passionate, left-wing political reformer I was to the morally poor, sleek, only slight-left-of-centre bourgeois thing I am.

Yes I have somehow managed so far to remain uncontaminated by high net-worth NIMBYism (high net-worth NIMBY toffs radiate entitlement selfishness at its most toxic). But creeping conservatism keeps creeping up on me, like the tide creeping up on the land.

Once upon a time one wanted to smash the state but now, at 77, all I dream of doing is trying to give it an occasional Utopian nudge.

Where does one's idealism go? Why does its evaporation seem, with death and taxes, the third great inevitability of a human's life? When will a caring Big Pharma and visionary immunologists develop for mankind a vaccine that, with annual boosters, protects us against the pestilence of disillusionment?

But I do still lead a rich fantasy life and find myself imagining PM Anthony Albanese, once a passionate leftist aflame with idealism (and always looking up at Labor's ever-beckoning Light on the Hill) this week sleepless at The Lodge. He is Sleepless in Deakin.

It is 3am and, conscience-stricken, he is pacing the corridors of his lonely Deakin mansion (with its tear in every room). His dog Toto (the ABC TV satire show The Weekly With Charlie Pickering refers to it with exasperation as "Albo's f---ing dog because it always irritatingly there in every effing prime ministerial effing photo-op) is, of course, with him.

As the PM paces he is asking himself agonising questions of who he is, what he has become, of what (if anything) he still stands for. By the guttering light of the candle he is holding (in a now antique candleholder dating from when Robert Menzies lived here in candlelit times) he is suddenly confronted by the ghost of Albo Past.

"An only $3 million cap?" the ghost, its face haggard with disappointment, accuses in a quavering (but strangely youthful, even Young Labor) voice.

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"What has become of you? How have you let the bright revolutionary pinkness of your youth fade to this establishment beige? How could you so sell your soul? For shame, Anthony. For shame."

Then, with a last reproachful look into the eyes of Today's Albo, the spectre of Albo Past glides away through a wall, and is gone.

The tormented PM, Today's Albo, resumes his nocturnal wandering, his candleholder hand shaking now, hoping this confrontation has been all a dream but knowing in his heart (for f---ing Toto, too, saw the ghost and fled in fear) that it was all as real as real can be.