Another blow upside the head for Treasurer Chicken Chalmers. This time from Chris Richardson:
…The treasurer knows the nation’s ongoing promises to itself cost more than what we’re charging ourselves. But his government doesn’t have the mandate to do much about it because both sides of politics ran screaming from such hard issues during the election.
In turn, that means this budget will make a choice. The government can do what it has promised to do or it can do what it should do.
Three areas would benefit from a much-needed dose of courage.
First, the leap in world energy prices after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has highlighted failures in the way we tax our resource riches. Mistakes made decades ago allowed gas producers to build huge tax deductions, leaving Australia raising embarrassingly little tax from a key resource. The budget can and should do better on that front.
Second, the stage three personal tax cuts aren’t the fairness fail that Twitter sees them as: they don’t hugely shift the dial on the proportion of tax that people pay. (For example, the top 10 per cent of personal income taxpayers paid an average of 44.9 per cent of all personal tax over the past decade. If stage three goes ahead as planned, that share will be … 45.1 per cent – pretty much bang on that average.)
Yet even though they’re not particularly unfair, they are particularly expensive. And with Australia’s budget in need of some repair, trimming those stage three cuts – rather than abandoning them – makes a whole lot of sense.
Finally, we need to do better in controlling spending. In particular, although Australia’s National Disability Insurance Scheme is kicking goals for the nation’s disabled, its cost is rising much faster than originally projected. (The aim was for the cost of the NDIS to be only a bit more than 1 per cent of national income, but it’s on track to cost closer to 3 per cent.)
Sounds good to me. But let’s tax coal harder too. Preferably via an export levy which will crash the local price as well as collect the war windfall. A super profits tax will do if we have to but then you have to recycle it for energy users and it will be less efficient.
