Hypocrisy rains down in Federal Parliament

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By Leith van Onselen

The Turnbull Government has claimed a “gotcha” moment today, pulling-up footage of Bill Shorten supporting a 1% cut to the company tax rate in 2011 (you can watch it here):

ScreenHunter_13330 Jun. 03 10.10

Conveniently, the Coalition failed to mention that Labor’s proposed cut to the company tax rate was conditional on the passing of the original mining tax, hence it effectively represented a distribution of taxes from large mining companies to non-mining companies. And for this reason, the Coalition opposed Labor’s cut to the company tax rate, while supporting a cut now. Hypocritical much?

Of course, there is no shortage of hypocrisy when it comes to this election campaign.

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We have the Coalition opposing reform to Australia’s negative gearing and capital gains tax regime, despite Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull labelling these unproductive “tax shelters” in 2005, former Treasurer Joe Hockey recommending restricting negative gearing to new homes only in his final speech to parliament, and current Treasurer Scott Morrison admitting there were “excesses” in the system.

We also have the Coalition under Tony Abbott staunchly opposing reforms to superannuation, only to back-track (sensibly) under Malcolm Turnbull’s leadership.

And we can’t forget Labor’s hypocritical opposition to the Coalition’s “retrospective” superannuation caps, even though its own super policy is just as “retrospective” and would likely tax wealthy superannuants even more.

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There are three things you can be certain of in life: death, taxes, and hypocritical politicians.

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About the author
Leith van Onselen is Chief Economist at the MB Fund and MB Super. He is also a co-founder of MacroBusiness. Leith has previously worked at the Australian Treasury, Victorian Treasury and Goldman Sachs.