Via Mark Kenny and Matt Wade at Domainfax:
Welcome to the tax election. The fairness election. The enterprise election. The election which, perhaps more than any in decades, invites voters to stand on one side or other of a gaping ideological chasm.
The choices are indeed stark: Malcolm Turnbull’s proudly low-tax, pro-business Coalition, determined to lift the dead hand of the state from companies and individuals, or Bill Shorten’s poll-leading Labor opposition, proclaiming an end to the failed neo-liberal experiment of ever-smaller government and the hoax of trickle-down economics.
The oft-muttered suburban lament about all politicians being the same may now be somewhat outdated.
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Roskam says Liberals were buoyed by the commitments in the budget to flatten out the income tax system and to stick with the company cuts despite the difficult politics. “There’s a feeling they’ve got something they can campaign on, and there is a feeling they are sharpening the differences between Labor and Liberal, and they are sharpening the differences on liberal terms,” he says.
Labor offer millions of workers a tax cut of up to $928 a year in a bid to ramp up pressure on the Turnbull government, in the midst of an escalating debate on fair taxation.
“They’re happy to have a fight on entrepreneurship, and enterprise, and working hard, and while I don’t think they’re going hard enough on things like the top marginal rate, it’s a start.
He welcomed what he called a “growing difference in basic economic philosophies”.
Tax cuts are a very narrow way to gauge the ideologies of political parties. That both parties are offering them at all is itself evidence of the dominance of the Right. One is progressive and other regressive so this is more a battle between centre-Right and far-Right politics.
There are wider policies that are consistent with these definitions. Labor’s negative gearing reforms are market friendly, removing distortions that favour rent-seekers over price and supply side competition. That is classic liberal, centre-Right policy. I don’t see it offering to use public funds to build a million houses which is what the traditional Left would do.
Same goes for imputation reform which is really the removal of a favour for an interest group.
Sure, Labor is spending a little more on health and education. But there’s no move to make universities free nor roll back private health insurance nor providers. It’s centre-Right.
Carbon policy is the same. Labor plans to use price signals to push energy decarbonisation via the market. It’s not clear if it will deploy domestic reservation for gas yet. Centre-Right.
On each of these issue the Coalition says it favours the market but it actually favours is allowing extant private owners to destroy markets and extract rents which is far-Right.
Both agree on the ongoing destruction of wages, housing affordability and living standards via mass immigration. Far-Right on both counts. Both agree on free trade. Centre-Right for both.
The clearest difference between the parties is how their various reform proposals impact older Australians versus younger. But that’s not ideological division.
Your choice at the next election is centre-Right versus far-Right. The major sources of class warfare in Australia are intact.
Domainfax is as usual either deliberately obfuscating to protect its own rents or it needs a philosophy lesson.
