Coalition hooked on unfair taxes

Australians will not vote for economic policies they know to be unfair, so the Coalition can’t be too explicit about it – like Abbott and Hockey were – or they’re toast.

Turnbull appears to believe he can deliver the radical economic outcomes Abbott couldn’t if his team – that same Coalition team – just delivers a better sales pitch. He said as much himself in that mightily revealing spill night speech.

The Coalition’s hucksters are at least explicit about this part of their strategy. For Turnbull’s tilt at a GST increase, Arthur Sinodinos, newly-resurrected, claimed urgency was needed to “sell a story to the Australian people”. The AFR reports that communications minister Mitch Fifield “said selling the changes to Australia would nearly be as important as the changes themselves”.

But Australians are right to question just why this particular “reform” is the one preferred by Turnbull. He could instead address revenue gouging created by multinational tax avoidance, domestic tax evasion, superannuation tax concessions, diesel fuel rebates and negative gearing. He could establish a common-sense Buffett Rule, or, you know, simply increase the Medicare Levy.

He’s not going to. For all their colourful antics the Coalition remains an assortment of pro-business and propertied neoliberals, neoconservatives, neocon-libs, neo-lib-cons and petrified single-minded recalcitrants.

Protecting the wealthy is, as always, the real agenda of the Coalition’s taxation “reform”, because – and this may surprise those Australians who have already had their pensions cut, or their services cancelled, or are living in terror of higher medical or education fees - apparently, it’s not about raising revenue.

Hockey insisted there was a “budget crisis” to justify spending cuts – but now assistant treasurer Kelly O’Dwyer’s assures that an increased GST is about “improving the overall tax intake and not increasing it”. The sales claim from the Coalition is for “improving economic efficiency” because to claim that increasing the notoriously regressive GST is fair is not true.

As modelling this week from the Australian Council of Social Services showed, increasing the GST to 15% would cost the poorest Australian families an extra 7% of their disposable income. It would cost the richest families only an additional 3.6% .