Anthony Albanese flew into Perth this week to peddle a fiscal fairytale: Western Australia gets to keep its bloated GST cash, but don’t worry because the other states (that’s the rest of us) lose nothing and the Commonwealth magically absorbs the cost of it all.
But is that really true?
The mask slipped live on air for Albo. After guaranteeing that the other states get their ‘fair share’, the PM issued a mafia style threat: ‘We’ll bear that in mind…when we’re talking about other funding arrangements with the states.’
Translation: we’ll find a way to screw them over don’t worry.
Asked directly whether NSW deserved its ‘fair share’, Albo couldn’t even bring himself to say yes.
He simply repeated that WA deserved its fair share. It was a remarkable refusal by a Prime Minister from Sydney to defend his own state while grovelling for votes in Perth.
So Albo has warned that Canberra may claw back the GST compensation through future deals on hospitals, schools and roads.
That is the trick at the heart of the promise.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese posed for a selfie with WA Premier Roger Cook, Defence Minister Richard Marles and BAE Systems Australia staff during a visit to Perth this week
Labor’s internal polling must be flashing red over One Nation’s surge in the west. Pictured is One Nation leader Pauline Hanson
If a state loses hospital funding, infrastructure money or education support so that its GST share can be nominally protected, it’s still worse off.
The raid on its coffers has merely been shifted to another line item in the budget where Albo hopes fewer voters will notice.
Which is precisely why NSW Labor Premier Chris Minns is so outraged by the PM’s antics.
Keeping this GST trickery alive with billions in Commonwealth top-ups, while staring down a $31.5 billion deficit and more than $1 trillion in gross debt, is economic vandalism.
So Albo breaking his promise by stealth is understandable, if it happens.
The Commonwealth isn’t a magical third party with unlimited money. It’s funded by the same households and businesses already paying state taxes and the GST.
Every extra billion shovelled into this arrangement must be borrowed (adding to debt and interest payments), raised via other taxes or withheld from services that need the cash.
Albo is effectively covering taxpayers money in Commonwealth gift wrapping, handing it back to one state (WA) and boasting that nobody has to pay for it when in fact they do. It’s a fraud.
NSW Labor Premier Chris Minns (pictured back) is outraged by the PM’s antics
Anthony Albanese (eft) declared that there would be no change to Western Australia’s favourable GST arrangement while he remains PM
The arithmetic is also unforgiving. The PM can protect WA by making other states pay, or protect WA by making taxpayers pay. He can’t protect WA and honestly pretend nobody else pays for that.
The Productivity Commission has already exposed this scam. Scott Morrison’s 2018 panic driven policy, now extended by Albo, has cost the Commonwealth almost $23 billion while leaving WA $22 billion better off.
The principle matters as much as the price tag. GST equalisation is supposed to help states provide comparable services despite their different capacities to raise revenue.
A politically guaranteed floor turns that logic completely upside down. It rewards electoral leverage rather than needs, and tells every future government that the loudest state can demand a special deal.
Once that becomes the rule, national reform gives way to permanent interstate extortion.
NSW has 31 per cent of the population but receives just 26 per cent of GST revenue.
No wonder Minns, Peter Malinauskas and Ben Carroll are revolting.
Roger Cook can sneer at his critics as ‘east coast clowns’, but Malinauskas has identified the punchline Albo should fear: wining the lion’s share of WA seats is useless if Labor loses its majority across the rest of Australia.
Labor’s internal polling must be flashing red over One Nation’s surge in the west.
Albo is effectively covering taxpayers money in Commonwealth gift wrapping, handing it back to one state and boasting that nobody has to pay for it, Peter van Onselen (pictured) writes
Before 2022, Labor held just five of WA’s 15 federal seats.
Albo then launched his campaign in Perth, swept up a swag of electorates and expanded the haul during the 2025 rout of Peter Dutton.
Labor now holds 11 of WA’s 16 seats and is desperate to keep them.
The Liberals are such a shambles, especially in WA, that they scarcely register as the immediate threat.
One Nation is a vastly different story, however.
That is the grubby calculation behind Albo’s pandering: protect Labor’s western windfall by showering the state with special treatment, then screw over the rest of the country and hope the second half of the transaction can remain hidden.
Morrison birthed this mutant policy out of sheer electoral terror. But a bad Liberal policy doesn’t suddenly become good policy just because a Labor PM lacks the spine to kill it off. Morrison’s original cowardice is no alibi for a callow Albo matching him.
Instead of fixing the federation, the PM is cementing the rot and pre-empting the Productivity Commission’s final report by promising WA its 75 cent floor for as long as he holds office.
When a radio host asked Albo if voters should believe him, the answer covers up the reality that believing our PM is fools gold.
Because Albo’s track record is littered with broken election promises.
