Here at the Free Enterprise Centre for Law Reform, we have been slaving away on some long-overdue improvements to the commercial and property law of Australia. In fact, we have finally found a way of showing the urgent need for these reforms and how they can be achieved.

But before explaining them, we must first give thanks to the Prime Minister for providing the stimulus for our reforms and the framework within which they can be presented. We refer to Mr Albanese’s announcement that his government will hit the private sector with an extra tax by no longer allowing a discount of half of the capital gains tax, another tax by abolishing negative gearing and a third new tax on trusts.

We would of course have preferred that the government had not proposed any of these reforms. However, every cloud has a silver lining and the justification on which these new taxes are based has given rise to the prospect of some real reforms to the way in which business and individuals will be able to conduct themselves. Indeed, they provide the prospect of levelling the playing field so that, if our reforms are accepted, the rules of the game in the private sector will be the same as those applying to the government.

But how, you ask, has this situation arisen? It derives from the way in which Mr Albanese has justified his changes to the tax law and how we can build on them for a sounder and more moral business environment. As the astute reader would have noticed, he has relied on two very sensible principles to justify his new taxes. The first is the explanation he has given for breaking his solemn word in promising that he would not change the law on capital gains tax, negative gearing or trusts.  His promise in that regard was made and repeated so many times that it became an article of faith recited with a conviction no less than one would expect from a good Catholic boy clutching his prayer book in his formative years. Indeed, it was with an air of understandable exasperation that on numerous occasions over the last two years he rounded on pesky journalists and asserted with an air of righteous indignation that: ‘I have told you 50 times that we will not introduce any of these three new taxes. How many more times do I have to tell you?’ Accordingly, the whole commercial and private community took him at his word and proceeded with their acquisition and sale of assets on the basis that there would be no such change to the taxation law under his government.

The second and equally valid principle that he enunciated came when he was asked how he could possibly justify breaking his solemn promise not to impose these new taxes, no matter how many times he had promised not to do so. With understandable indignation, he asserted: ‘What nonsense! I did not break a promise. I simply changed my position.’ When pressed on what was the difference between these two concepts, he replied with a clarity and precision that even the press gallery must have understood: ‘My old position was that there would be no such change to the tax law, but my new position is that there will be several of them.’

Democracies are often disappointed with decisions made by their elected leaders. But no one could quibble with a leader such as our esteemed Prime Minister on either of the two profound principles he had thus enunciated. First, no commitment repeated only 50 times or fewer is binding on a government. Secondly, if the government had merely changed its position, its new position could be carried through with dignity and a clean conscience.

These basic principles have the additional value of being flexible, a flexibility that governments need to cover the contingency that things might not turn out as favourably as one might have hoped, just like in business.

Our research has therefore inexorably led us to the conclusion that if these principles are good for a government, it is only fair that the same principles should be applied to liberate the private sector. After all, what is good for the goose of government must surely be good for the gander of free enterprise.

We have long thought that the private sector is unduly hamstrung by the present consumer law which imposes heavy and unreasonable burdens that prevent it from fulfilling its true role in the life of a nation. There are literally acres of consumer and company laws that impose crippling and draconian fines and damages on companies that engage in conduct described in the consumer and company law as misleading, unfair or unconscionable. For instance, supermarkets are prevented from claiming that their prices have been reduced, when they have remained the same or been increased.  Companies can be sued merely because their directors claim that the company will make a profit when it obviously will not. Even the humble used car dealer is pilloried for claiming that a motor vehicle will actually work.

But now, all of these regrettable restrictions can be removed by the application to the private sector of the epoch-making Albanese reforms to government. We therefore propose that no statement made by a company and no commercial conduct will be regarded as a promise unless it is made at least 51 times. Moreover, such statements will not be regarded as a promise at all, if the company has merely changed its position.

And to give them a catchy title that the whole commercial community will understand, the first will be named the Principle of 51. The second is the Principle of the Changed Position.

We even expect that the High Court, whose skill is unsurpassed in such exercises, will discover an implied term in the Constitution for both principles that were always there and which can now be given a new lease of life. And all under the stimulus of Mr Albanese and his momentous reforms.