The cacophony of the election has subsided, the battlefield cleared of its casualties, the people now safe to return to their homes free of the menace of door-to-door canvassers, Fake News memes and robo-polls.

A fragile peace has descended over the nation, interrupted only by the distant shots of the culture warriors attempting to mop up what’s left of the progressive resistance, determined to kick one final goal.

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As the victors and the vanquished prepare to commence the 46th parliament, all will be tested by their capacity to learn the right lessons from all that has transpired.

General Scomo returns to Canberra with the internal authority of a Sun King; having pulled off an unlikely victory running a one-man offensive that surprised even his own troops in its effectiveness.

As this week’s Essential Report* indicates, Scott Morrison’s personal approval levels have also been enhanced by his unlikely victory. Indeed, it is the strongest post-election result of a winning prime minister in the past decade.

Embedded in these figures, though, are grounds for caution. Morrison would be wrong to read the election win as a personal endorsement, still less than 50% of the electorate prefers him as their prime minister.

This was a successful negative campaign, no doubt, where enough Australians were convinced not to risk a change of government. What the election was not, however, was an endorsement of an ongoing war on trade unions or, for that matter, the government’s stubborn denial on climate change.

When Paul Keating snatched a similarly implausible victory via a negative tax campaign in 1993, the misreading of the mandate as a win for the “true believers” sparked an ambitious progressive agenda on reconciliation, the republic and regional engagement, which was ultimately rejected three years later.

A smarter reading by Morrison would be to regard the election as an opportunity to move the Coalition closer to the political centre, pushing Labor further to the fringes.

For Labor, the lessons to be learned are even more complex. Was this a rejection of its leader, its political agenda or simply the product of a well-funded, albeit dishonest scare campaign, trumping a crowded field of progressive propositions?

For his 23 years of public service, the new opposition leader, Anthony Albanese, remains a blank slate for 40% of Australians. The judgments he and his team make in the early days of opposition will be critical in filling that void.

While the temptation will be to find early opportunities to “define” the new leader, Albanese’s instincts to avoid kneejerk responses to the loss are sound.

The government will attempt to force his hand early, particularly around the only real policy it has on the table, the wide-ranging series of personal tax cuts. While there is bipartisan support for the economic case of tax cuts for lower and middle income workers who have been hamstrung by flatlining wages for some years, there are significant concerns with the impact of the cuts to the higher end.

Centre stage is the proposal to create a flat tax rate of 30% for the vast majority of Australians earning between $45,000 and $200,000. This would disproportionately favour those who are currently on higher tax margins with the biggest winners those on incomes above $200,000 by dint of the fact the tax on their incomes below $200,000 would be cut by $11,000 per annum.

While the government has been desperate not to break the tax plan into the different stages, best estimates are that the cost to the budget of these stage 3 measures will be in the ballpark of $90bn over the next decade.

In other words a government that won an election by making the status quo appear safe is now proposing a radical cut to its revenue base which will compromise its ability to deliver services, particularly should the economy begin to slow.

More fundamentally, it will lock in a model of government significantly more limited in its capacity to fund services and provide communities with the support they need. While Labor has been agonising with the politics of blocking stage 3 lest it be forced to fight another election on the battlefield of ‘higher taxes’, the public’s view appears more clearcut.

These findings should give Labor succour to at least force the stage 3 tax cuts to be fully scrutinised, perhaps by a Senate inquiry that would demand the costs of the package be isolated and scrutinised.

If this election tells us anything it is the Australian electorate is naturally conservative when it comes to taxation and needs to be convinced of the merits of change. Ensuring a light is shone on the impact of a radical reduction to the government’s funding base would be evidence that the right lessons have been learned all around.

* Essential will continue to poll the Australian public fortnightly on major political issues. However, over the next few months we are working to improve our two-party preferred modelling. In the interim we won’t be publishing voting intentions, however we will still report on issues of contemporary political interest.