From Peter Martin:
Information withheld from the budget shows high income couples may suffer scarcely at all while low income families on benefits could lose as much as 10 per cent of their incomes.
The information, normally included in the budget, calls into question the Treasurer’s claim that “everyone is being asked to make a contribution”.
Inserted into the 2005 budget by treasurer Peter Costello and included in every budget since, the table is usually titled “Detailed family outcomes”.
It sets out the way in which the budget measures make different types of families better or worse off. In 2005 Mr Costello displayed the results for six family types at 15 different levels of incomes.
…Joe Hockey’s budget is the first without it.
Meanwhile, ANU public policy experts Peter Whiteford and Daniel Nethery have replicated the table and reckon:
We find that people on benefits do the heaviest lifting. An unemployed 23-year-old loses $47 a week or 18 per cent of their disposable income. An unemployed lone parent with one eight-year-old child loses $54 per week or 12 per cent. Lone parents earning around two-thirds of the average wage lose between 5.6 per cent and 7 per cent of their disposable income. A single-income couple with two school-age children and average earnings loses $82 a week or 6 per cent of their disposable income.
Compare this to the $24, or less than 1 per cent of disposable income, paid through the deficit levy by an individual on three times the average wage – close to $250,000 by 2016–17. High-income couples could together bring in up to $360,000 a year and not contribute an extra cent.
Households stand to save $550 a year if power prices fall due to the abolition of the carbon tax. This is likely to have a mildly progressive effect but would offset less than one-fifth of the losses for the unemployed.
The pain will be greatest for working-age people at the lowest income levels.
I very much doubt the carbon tax savings will be passed on in full. It’s ugly stuff and really makes one question the values driving the Government.