Clive Palmer’s political theatrics are a sight to behold.
Following the release of the Federal Budget, the Palmer United Party (PUP) brushed-off claims of an impending Budget emergency and vowed to oppose virtually every significant measure in the Budget, including “the imposition of a debt tax, huge cuts to public sector jobs, increased health and education costs, [and] ripping the rug from underneath our most vulnerable with reduced welfare spending and increasing the pension age…” PUP also claimed that “there is no debt crisis and therefore the excuse to impose a two per cent debt tax and introduce other harsh budgetary measures”.
PUP has also previously argued that there should be no HECS or HELP fees for Australian university students. And who can forget its policies in the lead-up to last year’s election, including lowering income tax rates by 15%, increasing the Aged Pension by 20%, and injecting $80 billion into the health system.
Now PUP has come up with an ingenious proposal (sarc) to delay the $70 billion of company tax payments by one year, which would supposedly turbo-charge the economy, according to Palmer:
“If we change the reporting date on that from the beginning of the year to the end of the year, after we know what the results are, after we know we’ve actually earned a profit, we’d release $70bn into the economy through our business structures.
“We’d create more demand and more money supply to create more economic activity.
“If that money stays in our economy in the hands of individuals and it turns over just three times, we increase our revenue by $21bn through GST if it does that.”
Thankfully, Deloitte Access Economics director, Chris Richardson, was on hand to shut Palmer’s proposal down, arguing that it would do little to boost the economy, while blowing a massive one-off hole in the Budget:
“It just shuffles money from one hand to another”…
“If Mr Palmer winds back the timing of company tax payments he’s giving a break to companies that is not available to families — and it comes at a pretty big one-off cost to the budget”…
Of course, Palmer’s scatter-gun approach to the Budget has yielded a few sensible policies, including opposing Abbott’s wasteful paid parental leave scheme. But overall, PUP’s blanket opposition to almost every Budget measure, without providing workable alternatives, reeks of blatant populism, and ignores the very real structural pressures facing the Budget from falling commodity prices and an ageing population.
Being an effective opposition party is about developing an alternative plan for the nation, not just saying “no” to each and every major reform, while offering up a grab bag of unworkable and unrealistic policies.
