Dad’s Army’s Robert Gottliebsen (“Gotti”) is back today deriding Australia’s “young journalists” and defending the rights of older superannuants to avoid paying taxes:
When is a retiree rich? The catch cry among the young journalists in many media organisations is that the real problem for the nation is that we have developed a vast number of rich retirees who are not pulling their tax weight…
If the community feels it needs to tax the income from the superannuation savings of retirees, then the original Bill Shorten proposal of an indexed tax-free amount of $100,000 was a reasonable basis…
To be really rich retirees will need more than $2m in superannuation or even bigger houses.
So in Gotti’s world, retirees should be allowed to receive $100,000 annually in earnings from their superannuation funds, indexed to inflation, and pay absolutely zero taxes on those earnings?
Meanwhile, younger workers earning $100,000 through their productive effort should be made to pay $25,000 in income taxes, with income tax scales also not indexed to inflation?
Hardly sounds fair, does it?
What Gotti is effectively telling Australia’s youth is that he wants you to work longer and harder so that you can pay the taxes required to support the community. Meanwhile, his generation can sit back and enjoy an armchair ride in their large, expensive homes, which you also cannot afford and just happen to be excluded from the welfare/tax system.
If Gotti understood the concept of inter-generational fairness, he would instead argue to further tighten the assets test for the Aged Pension (by including the family home), slash tax concessions that benefit older, wealthier Australians (e.g. superannuation, negative gearing and CGT), and undertake measures that fundamentally reform the tax system to broaden the base and shift the tax burden away from labour and onto more efficient and equitable sources (e.g. land, resources and consumption), raising productivity in the process.
It is blatantly unfair to expect younger workers – whose share of the population will fall as the population ages and the proportion of retirees rises – to keep shouldering more and more of the tax burden and Budget cuts, at the same time as tax concessions on superannuation and housing, as well as access to the Aged Pension, go largely untouched.
