The finance minister, Mathias Cormann, says Bill Shorten is banking on enough young Australians forgetting the “historical failure of socialism” to prosecute a Jeremy Corbyn-style politics-of-envy campaign – which would deliver only “economic decline and social division”.



Cormann used a strongly worded speech to the Sydney Institute on Wednesday night to posit that Shorten was intent on inflicting socialism on an unwitting new generation, declaring that the Labor leader has made the “deliberate and cynical political judgment that enough Australians have forgotten the historical failure of socialism”.

He compared Labor’s policy platform to the policies of East German communism, characterising the opposition’s outlook as socialist revisionism.

“The Berlin Wall came down 28 years ago, which means roughly 18% of Australians enrolled to vote were born after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the failure of a system of government that destroyed the economies of eastern Europe,” the finance minister told his audience.

Cormann’s thesis was that Shorten was growing increasingly “cocky” and complacent in his pre-election pitch to voters but the overture would not ultimately succeed because the Labor leader had “overreached in his shift to the left”.

The finance minister said Labor was “misreading not only what is in the best interest of Australians today and into the future, but also the great aspirational spirit of the Australian people”.

Cormann’s speech was predominantly a rebuttal of Shorten’s political offensive about rising inequality, and his arguments that success in life is increasingly predetermined by parental income.

The minister said intergenerational income mobility was an important measure of equal opportunity to succeed, in that it measures the linkages between the socioeconomic status of parents and the economic performance and success of their adult children.

“Australia performs very well internationally when it comes to intergenerational income mobility,” he said. “Some dismiss these sorts of measures and indicators as too complicated and hard to communicate – and clearly for Bill Shorten it is just an inconvenient truth which he chose to ignore.”

“Indeed, according to the 2016 Stanford Poverty and Inequality Report, Australia was ranked sixth out of 24 middle- and high-income countries when it comes to providing opportunity to succeed in life through effort and hard work, rather than relying on the socioeconomic status of their parents.

“On this important measure, Australia ranks ahead of other significant countries including the UK, the US, Switzerland, France, Germany, Japan, New Zealand and Sweden.”

In an effort to blunt Labor’s political messaging on inequality, which is resonant in the community at a time of prolonged wages stagnation, the treasurer, Scott Morrison, has previously used the Gini coefficient to argue that income inequality has improved in Australia rather than deteriorated.

With all major opinion polls, apart from YouGov, showing that the Coalition is consistently trailing Labor on the two-party-preferred measure in the national political contest, the government is increasingly intensifying its political attack on Shorten, who lags behind Malcolm Turnbull on preferred prime minister ratings.

Labor has characterised the increasing stridency from senior government players from the prime minister down as obsessional and over the top.

Cormann on Wednesday argued that Shorten was intent on stoking “grievance and resentment with sneering attacks on millionaires”, and was also attempting to channel the anxiety of the community “to his own political advantage”.

“He wants to slide into office with the politics of envy and the economics of snake oil.”

The finance minister declared socialism had failed for a reason.

“If, as a government, you want to pursue equality of outcome instead of equality of opportunity, the people in our community that are best able to contribute to our success as a nation will either lose the incentive to work hard to be successful or they will leave and go to work hard and be successful somewhere else.

“Pursuing the socialist ideal of equality of outcome leads to mediocrity and stagnation. If you make it harder for aspirational Australians to get ahead, there will be less prosperity which would be bad for everyone.”