The latest federal budget takes a kicking to traditional Liberal-National targets like Tafe, universities, migrants, foreign aid, corporate regulation and the ABC. But that’s hardly news.

What’s news is Scott Morrison’s budget centrepiece of old-school, rightwing whackadoo – tax flattening. A plan to homogenise the majority of Australians into the one tax bracket by 2024 is a paradigm-shaking upward distribution of wealth so extreme that the economists at Per Capita have denounced it as “the most radical attack on Australia’s progressive income tax scales in living memory.” The Australia Institute calculated that someone on $200,000 a year who already earns five times as much as someone on $40,000 will now be gifted 16 times the tax benefit, too.

Flat taxes are so bad, Russia has them. Even former US labor secretary Robert Reich has said “flat tax is a fraud. It raises taxes on the poor and lowers them on the rich.”

What we have now is a progressive income tax system. The percentage rate of income tax increases as the amount of income grows. The idea is more Australian than Australia. It existed in the states prior to federation, and was enshrined as the bedrock of tax policy when we created the federal system in 1915. We’re an egalitarian nation and designed the tax system to fund quality infrastructure and services for everybody.

Yet Greg Jericho’s analysis made the point of Morrison’s tax flattening is not only to give more money to the rich. It’s also to “lock in the need to cut services”, given the real impact will be felt in reduced government revenue.

Liberals and Nationals cutting services. My, that’s something you see every day.

The sweetener from the Liberals and Nationals for all of these future service cuts is supposed to be a tax cut to low-to-middle income earners that amounts to about 10 bucks a week.

It says much to their lack of economic management skills that in today’s Australia they’re confident they can buy votes so cheaply. They should also get a medal for optimism, given that they think they’ll still be in government in 2024.

The flat tax is really about cutting services not taxes | Greg Jericho Read more

The post-budget polls are not yet in, but a twitter campaign #keepmytendollars has already mobilised thousands of people to suggest they’d rather trade in their tax cut for services.

Morrison was literally on the national stage defending tax cuts for corporations who charge fees to dead people while thousands of people were asking for more hospitals, more schools, increases in welfare payments, spending on infrastructure and science, public transport and even maybe doing something about that impending climate catastrophe thing.

The commentariat has also been unkind. One analyst suggests the budget exists more as a fantasy neoliberal manifesto than anything else – a sentimental love letter from a government well aware they’re unlikely to ever requite their ambitions. Not so much Fightback! as Fallback. Or Fallover. Certainly, indications from One Nation, Tim Storer and Centre Alliance that they’ll reject the budget suggest some romances are done.

The neoliberal media machine once mobilised its message through everything from newspapers, to board games, to kids’ books, to truly weird movies to achieve economic hegemony. Morrison’s flat-taxing budget suggests, fatefully, the conservatives have believed their own propaganda.

Alas for them, media in this country is no longer mono-directional. Everyone has the infinite human library of the internet and a personal publishing empire in their pocket. Abbie Hoffman’s instruction that the modern revolutionary head to the television station is now a journey as far as your smartphone.

It’s made the economic reality of ordinary Australian experience more visible than it’s ever been. While once neoliberals could insist Australian “dole bludgers” were real and nobody likes to pay tax, social media’s facilitated the spread of more sincere narratives – of denied job opportunity, deskilled young people, regional depression and Centrelink persecution. Hence the fury at the robo-debt fiasco. Or uproar when MP Julia Banks claimed she could live on Newstart for its pittance $40 a day.

Coalition's flat tax to benefit well-off city dwellers over regional Australians Read more

While the Coalition imagine an electorate where selfishness remains a virtue, something their ideology can’t fathom what is happening outside. This week, the union movement mobilised record crowds in marches across the country, demanding a new economic agenda for fairness.

There were tens of thousands on the streets in Brisbane, 5,000 in Fremantle, crowds from Rockhampton to Canberra, to Wollongong and Geelong. Then, there was Melbourne – and the river of farmworkers shoulder-to-shoulder with academics, journalists, meteorologists, machinists, construction workers, teachers, public servants, early childhood workers, cleaners, carers, even lawyers. Every conceivable profession, flooding the city blocks all the way from Trades Hall. Even I couldn’t believe it, and I was there.

Some participants in the 100,000-strong Melbourne throng were interviewed by the Australian:

John, a 22 year old electrician, told The Australian he wanted to march for childcare workers and nurses. ‘Those poor nurses. All the bull they put up with and yet they don’t get a fair day’s pay,” he said. George, a 27 year old carpenter and CFMEU member, said the rally was ‘for equal rights’... ‘We have a bit more power than the smaller unions,’ he said, ‘We need to march together and back them up.’

Morrison and Malcolm Turnbull may still believe in neoliberalism but I don’t think Australians do.

