Labor is sadly lacking the JFK factor

INFANTILE Labor Senator Sam Dastyari and his whingeing Green colleague Senator Christine Milne are wasting tens of thousands of dollars of taxpayers’ dollars with their ill-considered investigation into corporate tax avoidance.

Their populist rush to masquerade as financial watchdogs backfired badly and further exposed their shocking ignorance about international business — as would be expected from individuals who have never held executive jobs in the real world. Nor, given their performances in their own committee of inquiry Wednesday, do they appear to be equipped for life outside the sheltered workshops of the union movement and Green-Left politics. Senators Dastyari and Milne should have done their homework. The Coalition is actively, through the OECD, moving with other nations to close the gaps and loopholes which currently permit corporations to shift profits to locations where they will receive more favourable tax treatment. But the hapless duo don’t understand the essentials of business. The business of business is to make profits — both to reinvest and grow and also to repay shareholders who have risked their money ­financing enterprises. Profit is a dirty word to Labor, which is now so firmly in the control of the union movement that it is prepared to stand by while thuggish union bosses shut down projects and destroy thousands of jobs in futile power struggles. The Greens have now moved so far from their ­environmentalist origin that their appeal is largely confined to inner urban areas in which real environmental problems don’t exist. Both Labor and the Greens are tax-and-spend addicts. Their electoral appeal ­relies on the redistribution of taxes they gouge from workers and businesses. This is the ultimate in self-defeating exercises. Half a century ago US President John F Kennedy, faced with a stalled economy announced a break with traditional Democratic party practises and promised to cut taxes in both the private and business sectors. He announced his plans in an address to the Economic Club of New York in December, 1962, saying: “In short, it is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high today and tax revenues are too low and the soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the rates now.” He continued: “The experience of a number of European countries and Japan have borne this out. “This country’s own experience with tax reduction in 1954 has borne this out. “And the reason is that only full employment can balance the budget, and tax ­reduction can pave the way to that employment.” Treasurer Joe Hockey should also take note. “The purpose of cutting taxes now is not to incur a budget deficit but to achieve the more prosperous, expanding economy which can bring a budget surplus,” Kennedy said. The practical choice, he repeated, was not between a tax-cut deficit and a budgetary surplus. It was between two kinds of deficits — a chronic deficit of inertia, as the unwanted result of inadequate revenues and a restricted economy, or a temporary deficit of transition, resulting from a tax cut designed to boost the economy, increase tax revenues, and achieve, he believed, a budget surplus. He dismissed the first type of deficit as a sign of waste and weakness. But the second, he said, reflected an investment in the future: “The final and best means of strengthening demand among consumers and business is to reduce the burden on private income and the deterrents to private initiative which are imposed by our present tax system.” A JUGGERNAUT STUCK ON A ROAD TO NOWHERE NSW Opposition leader Luke Foley hasn’t learned anything from last month’s ­electoral defeat. He told this week’s caucus meeting that the plan for the next four years would be to ­“attack, attack, attack”, explaining that state Labor should do to state Premier Mike Baird what federal Labor is doing to Prime Minister Tony Abbott. There are several flaws in Foley’s blinkered approach. The first, of course, is that Premier Baird is not Prime Minister Abbott. Most voters get that, and that’s why the much-predicted blowback against the federal Coalition was barely discernible during the NSW election despite the desperate efforts of the ABC and the Fairfax media to convince voters there was a direct connection between the two leaders and that they should use their NSW votes to register a protest against the federal government. The second is that Mr Foley’s campaign was based on union advertising which was nothing but a series of unrelenting lies, untruths and misinformation for which Mr Foley is yet to apologise. A caucus insider confirms that there was no focus on policy development during the ­meeting. This suggests that NSW Labor is blind to the growing contempt with which ­federal ­Opposition leader Bill “Mr No” ­Shorten is held in the electorate. Mr Foley further demonstrated that he leads a party intent on distancing itself from the centre by personally wooing Labor’s ­failed candidate for the seat of Newtown, Penny Sharpe, back into the Upper House seat she vacated when she stood for the Legislative ­Assembly. On election night, Ms Sharpe announced that she would not be returning to the NSW parliament but Mr Foley has persuaded her to do so despite the reality that the former ­Marrickville councillor and community activist was overwhelmingly rejected by Newtown voters, receiving just 30 per cent of the first preference vote in the contest she lost to Green candidate Jenny Leong. Under Mr Foley, the Labor Party is lurching even further to the Left (with the unions sitting firmly on their shoulders) to confront the Greens in a fight they cannot win in the inner city region. Having won Newtown and Balmain, the Greens are now set to shrug off Labor in ­Summer Hill and Heffron.