Pity the man who attempts tax reform in the age of artificial intelligence. Anthony Albanese is that man, and so far, the internet has been unkind, although not nearly as unkind as it could be, and as it undoubtedly would be if the prime minister was a woman.
Since Labor unveiled its plans in the budget to roll back capital gains tax concessions (among other things), the prime minister has been the subject of a meme-powered social media campaign, depicting him as the gormless, grinning, self-appointed co-owner of small businesses across the country. The man who started the meme parade, business founder Frank Greeff, posted the first AI-doctored effort online.
In it, the prime minister is sandwiched between Greeff and his business partner, giving Greeff a fist-bump, above a caption that reads: “Every Australian founder just got a new-co founder with 47 per cent equity.”
This is a misleading distortion of Labor’s proposed policy, which is to remove the 50 per cent discount on capital gains that people like Greeff have previously enjoyed, courtesy of the taxpayer. But like all the best disinformation, there is a thin, oily residue of truth in it. The 47 per cent is a reference to the top marginal tax rate, which business owners could pay – in the single year they sell their business – if their capital gain is large enough.
That is quite different to the government nationalising a near-50 per cent stake in a business.
But hey, this is the internet, right? Memes often employ irony, and effective rhetoric is needed to win any argument.
Greeff encouraged other business owners to follow suit, and they did. Dodgy AI versions of the prime minister were photoshopped into beauty clinics and pizza parlours. A company called Asset Landscapes depicted the PM in high-vis, announcing him as Employee of the Month. “Albo has come in hard and strong, rolled up his sleeves, pushed hard and has also come onboard and taken a 47 per cent equity [stake] in the business. Good on ya Albo, you’re a great bloke. He is a real champion for the working class.” And then a clown emoji.
Of course, as Greeff, the architect of the campaign, pointed out in an interview with the ABC: “Not all businesses are going to be taxed at 47 per cent, that’s correct.”
(Taxing a business is also quite distinct from acquiring equity in it, but hey, details.)
“I had a choice,” Greeff explained. “Do you do something that is bold and that is going to catch fire on the internet and that gets enough attention to create a conversation? Ultimately, that’s all I’m looking for.”
And then he said the quiet part out loud: “That’s just kind of like the truth of social media and [what] attention is like, unfortunately – the more nuance you have, the quicker someone will scroll past and not really care about what you’re saying.”
It was quite a remarkable admission, and absolutely correct.
Excruciating attempts by Chalmers and Albanese to explain their tax policy have had the distinct flavour of content that “someone will scroll past and not really care about what you’re saying”.
Nuance is a real vibe killer. Context makes for bad content.
It’s all good business for Ed Coper, a political communications expert who has just published a book called Angertainment: How social media outrage ruins everything. Coper has advised the Albanese government on internet-driven misinformation, particularly around the campaign for the failed Voice to Parliament referendum.
The social media-driven backlash to the CGT changes is perfect timing for his book – it proves his point nicely.
Coper told me: “One of the questions of the book is, ‘Can we have nice things any more? Can we do evidence-based policy reform in this environment?’ Social media reduces everything to an emotive catchphrase stripped of all the context; that’s what a meme is. Where you have social hysteria and noise, backed in by legacy media which covers it, you can’t even have piecemeal sensible reform, let alone anything substantial.”
Coper says “our only hope” is that governments can hold their nose through social media outrage and trust that it’s not necessarily representative of community concern.
(It should be noted, for the record, that Coper worked on Labor’s “Mediscare” campaign during the 2016 election, which took a tiny kernel of truth and beat it up into a fear that then-PM Malcolm Turnbull had plans to privatise Medicare. When I interviewed Coper in 2022, he called the campaign “a competition for the dominant narrative”.)
We live in a democracy and people are entitled to marshal whatever tools they like to argue their corner. Irony and satire are effective forms of critique. But when AI-powered disinformation is allowed to front-run debates, we might take a moment to consider the effect on our democracy.
The arc of trolling on social media often bends towards misogyny, and if the prime minister or the treasurer were a woman, the memes might easily be deepfake nudes of her selling her tax policy.
A few weeks ago, Italian Prime Minister Georgia Meloni called out a deepfake image of her wearing lingerie, which was being shared online. Julia Gillard famously had to contend with idiot cartoonists who put naked sketches of her on nasty little blogs. Nothing so quaint would be required now – the equivalent idiot would just run a full-length photo of the female PM through a de-clothing app, and post it on X. With the right algorithmic settings, millions of voters could see such an image within hours. At that point, any policy she was proposing would be less than irrelevant.
Hyperbole about the Albanese/Chalmers changes was not confined to social media, of course. One newspaper account quoted a business founder who felt “personally attacked” by the changes.
In 2014, former Liberal treasurer Joe Hockey brought down his 2014 budget, with its deep cuts to public services including Medicare. A couple of years prior, he gave a landmark speech about ending the “age of entitlement”. Hockey was talking about the alleged entitlement mentality of people on welfare. Now we seem to be in a new age of entitlement, where any moderation of tax concessions enjoyed for many years by a select few is perceived as a personal attack.
Perhaps the changes are horrendous for the economy and will murder aspiration. Perhaps they constitute a drive-by shooting on the diligence and decency of small business people and mum-and-dad shareholders. Certainly, they are harder to argue for without a corresponding cut in income tax. But we will only find out if we debate the actual proposal, not its meme-ified, ironic internet avatar.
In the rationalist tradition, the use of emotive language is a sign you’re losing the argument. Now, it seems to be the best way to win it.
Jacqueline Maley is a columnist and senior writer.
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