Ken Henry makes a splash today at The Australian:
Former Treasury secretary Ken Henry has blamed successive federal governments for presiding over a decade-long failure to deliver meaningful tax reform, leaving government unable to fund itself and average Australians shouldering an increasing income-tax burden to pay for it.
The National Australia Bank chairman has also delivered a blunt message to business that if it wants to be “taken seriously” in the debate over company tax cuts, it will have to adopt a new role in society that includes a social compact.
In his first expansive speech on tax reform since delivering a road map for tax reform to the Rudd government in 2010, Dr Henry will today warn that no progress on tax reform will be made if business and government fail to set a shared “social purpose”.
That’s some useful insight for the army of self-serving interests campaigning for the corporate tax cut.
And the AFR:
Had Dr Henry’s 2010 recommendations been taken seriously by state and federal governments, he says citizens would no longer be paying payroll tax; stamp duties on houses, cars and insurance; the Medicare Levy; and fuel excise; or dealing with “ad hoc” renewable energy targets.
Instead, there would already be a system in place based on a simpler broad-based consumption tax without exemptions – in place of an increasingly compromised GST; a uniform national resource rent tax; a 25 per cent company tax rate for all companies; progressive land taxes; road user charging, and – most dramatically – a simplified two-rate personal income tax system, with most people enjoying the lower of the two marginal rates.
Quite right on all fronts. We would also support a corporate tax were it a part of a larger reform package designed to reward productive effort across the economy. But in the absence of that, and the many revenue and cost offsets delivered in the Henry Review, there are simply more pressing reforms to pursue.
