Yesterday the boldest ideas came from the party with no power to enact them, while a government only weeks old spent the day reacting to events rather than shaping them.
Crossbencher · 16 August 2026
Yesterday the boldest ideas came from the party with no power to enact them, while a government only weeks old spent the day reacting to events rather than shaping them.
Reform set the terms. The party used the quiet of an August weekend to put out the most ambitious domestic plan anyone has offered this year: a wholesale overhaul of working-age welfare that would scrap the main disability payment, move more of the long-term sick toward work, and take tens of billions out of the bill. Most of the papers led on it. Whether the sums survive contact with reality is a fair challenge, and the objections arrived within the hour - that the vulnerable would be hurt, that the savings are hopeful rather than real. But the plan did the thing an opposition is for and a tired government seldom manages: it named a cost the main parties have spent a decade walking around, and it was willing to be unpopular about it.
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