It doesn't look like this government has the balls to really try and raise the GST.
It would be good if this Federal Government stopped making noises about raising the GST.
Paul Keating for one thinks it is a crap idea. More importantly, there are better things to reform in the tax code than simply raising the GST.
The biggest economic boost would come not from a switch from income tax to GST but from a switch from stamp duty to land tax. To get it the Commonwealth would have to knock together the heads of a few state premiers, but according to the the discussion paper that kicked off the tax reform process, it's where the big gains lie.
Capital gains are taxed at only half the rate of income earned from interest in bank accounts. The discussion paper asks whether that's appropriate and talks about taxing all income from saving at the same (discounted) rate.
Fringe benefits tax, employee deductions, business deductions, dividend imputation and the role of the family home all come under the microscope in the discussion paper. Getting the GST off the table would allow the government to focus on fixing what's really broken.
That sounds about right.
Asylum Seeker Politics Is Toxic?
Tanya Plibersek says that asylum seeker politics is toxic since 2011. You get the point that it is nothing but unrelenting ugliness when it comes to news about Nauru or Manus Island with their detention centres. We find - in subjective terms - what happens and is happening on those islands to be morally wanting, but the High Court has ruled that it is all legal. This is actually a lot more delicate than personal moral reasoning. The political class of this nation has taken a mostly bipartisan approach in saying that the people smuggling business is culpable for the boats, and the casualties that come with. As such, the current policy seeks to shutdown the product the people smugglers are peddling, which is arrival in Australia.
That's the line the political classes holding to, because if they break there, the boat arrivals will be on for young and old. The boats are spectacular as an image - so much so the words 'refugee' and 'asylum seeker' have become largely interchangeable. The problem for both sides of politics is that the boat arrivals upend not one, but two parts of sovereign borders. First is the notion of immigration policy, and the other is actual physical transgression of our borders. There's a certain level of commitment to these things that if the government were to simply forego these things, they may as well pack up shop and go home.
So the problem isn't that the politics is toxic; it is that all discussion of the policy is burdened with the raison d'être of the state itself. The reductio ad absurdum of this 'argument' expresses itself with the detention centres on Nauru and Manus Island. It's unpleasant, but business of the state is always tinged with this unpleasantness on one level or another. It's not surprising the High Court threw out the case it did. Inadvertently, our whole political system is hitched to the 'Stop The Boats' slogan.
It's not like Tanya Plibersek has a workable alternative.
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