Turnbull Turns Bull Dust

No, No, This Is Shit

Malcolm Turnbull's tenure as Prime Minister is turning into a cavalcade of bad ideas that get paraded, only be dumped or backtracked or diminished to the point of making no difference. All this expectation that somehow Malcolm Turnbull was going to prove to be a good Prime Minister has been eroded by months of these policy weather balloons he keeps launching. Most of the time these weather balloons seem to catch fire, and rightfully so because he's come up with some terrible ideas. These terrible ideas included the 50% hiking of the GST to chasing the estate of the dead for HECS debt.

Anyway, this week saw two more terrible ideas being floated by Malcolm Turnbull-dust. The first was the idea that States should be allowed to collect their own income tax. Not only is it historically retrograde, it doubles up on the tax collecting and is therefore inefficient and costly. Yet Malcolm Turnbull wants to do this because the Federal Government gets to cut income tax by 2%. It's really daft because it' predicated on this really stupid notion that the States ought to be competitive. Doing so would probably untie the States from their brethren as well as encourage the crazy talk of secession as well as drive Tasmania into the ground. This is supposed to be a commonwealth where all states are in it together - not a confederacy and a confederacy of dunces at that.

Because even blind Freddie can see that it would be a disaster, then you wonder why the vaunted intellect of Malcolm Turnbull ca't figure out this obvious problem all on his own. The answer that is that he doesn't want to see the problem because this suggestion is his cure to the problem whereby the Federal Government needs to increase revenue, while the stated goal of any Coalition Government is to cut taxes. Given the two contradictory imperatives, Malcolm Turnbull has decided that the Federal Government will cut taxes while hiving off to the States, the responsibility of raising revenues by collecting income tax. It is rather stunning in its gormlessness.

Concomitant to that bad idea is the notion that the Federal Government would get out of education and so stop funding public schools - but it will keep giving money to private schools. It rankles to see this is the headline after seeing Michael Moore's film two nights ago whereto Finnish eduction minister pinned their system's success to having no private education. That the Australian Government is trying to kill public education and make it entirely private is not only despicable and wrong-headed, it reeks of the sort of ideological nastiness that wasn't in Australian politics before John Howard. The fact that such idea balloons can even be floated for discussion shows a real lurch to the right by the Coalition.

Mike Baird - another practising class warrior for the right - was making noises on a doorstep soundbite that he welcomes Turnbull handing over the power to collect income tax and he supports these ideas; but really, how is it going to be any kind of reform if the macro structure of taxation is going to go back to World War II? Of course Turnbull is accused of doing a runner ahead of the COAG meeting, so chances are even this idea is going to die on the vine (thankfully) but it will eat up valuable air time to discuss proper taxation reform or education.

If there is any serious takeaway from all this, it is the obvious problem of Malcolm Turnbull being no less a class warrior for the privileged than Tony Abbott. As such, it is really hard to see why the swinging voter really should be giving Turnbull the time of day when he is setting things up to hurt them the most - because let's face it the 1% are not swinging voters.