Michael Daley’s luxury car and yacht tax is class warfare at its worst

Michael Daley’s Robin Hood raid on so-called wealthy car and yacht buyers reflects out-of-date class warfare politics and also attacks aspirational ALP voters

• Labor to tax luxury cars, yachts for $2.8b nurse plan
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When the history of the 2019 state election campaign is written, this will be remembered as the week ­Michael Daley went to the attic, rummaged around in an old box of ­Halloween costumes, and came back downstairs dressed as Robin Hood.

Figuratively, of course.

But in releasing a policy to slap a levy on luxury cars and yachts to pay for nurses, Daley must have ­imagined that he was onto a ­winner: Take from the rich, give healthcare to the rest of us.

Portrait art for Anna Caldwell 1.3.19.

And at first it sounds like good left-wing politics — sting those rich out-of-touch Mercedes drivers, the pests of the inner-east and north shore — to fund one thing all voters can agree they like.

Bite the super wealthy to fund a better health system. What could go wrong?

As so often happens with this sort of class warfare, plenty.

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Not only will his proposed tax not come anywhere close to paying for the nurses he plans to hire, an analysis of just where these much-loathed ­luxury rides are being sold shows it will also whack many of Labor’s core constituents.

This is a bad tax which will, in fact, hurt what reads like a roll call of his voter base: The aspirational middle-class, regional families with LandCruisers, border towns and even cashed-up greenies who want to drop a fortune on an electric car to show their commitment to saving the planet.

As Daley tries to carve up Sydney by dividing its haves from its have-nots, the truth is he’s missed his mark.

For example, Liverpool, an elect­orate which has been held by Labor since it was created in 1950, was the suburb ranked second-highest for purchasing Mercedes-Benz cars and the third-highest for BMWs in the last census.

The census analysis, published by News Corp in 2017, also showed that Newcastle, another Labor stronghold, had the second-highest number of Lamborghinis. They are also popular in Wollongong and Greenacre.

The same data tells us that Ferraris are particularly popular in Wetherill Park, which falls in the electorate of Prospect, a Labor electorate that the Liberals quietly think they might be able to pluck off.

And, there were just as many Lamborghinis bought in Penrith, Smithfield and Marrickville as there were in Hunters Hill and Rose Bay.

New South Wales Opposition Leader Michael Daley. Picture: AAP

Much social commentary has noted in recent years that as property prices all over Sydney soared, it was not uncommon for young people locked out of the housing market to invest in cars as status symbols.

They are financing these cars and not paying for them outright as the class warriors’ narrative would have you believe.

This does not make them exceedingly wealthy, it just means this is where they chose to put their hard-earned money.

And it shows just how far Labor has come from the days of Hawke and Keating, who enacted reforms that helped small-businesspeople, tradies and the like to prosper like never before.

Of course, ever since John Howard recaptured this aspirational territory, what could be called the inner-city academic wing of Labor has sneered at such frippery (though their more commercial counterparts in suburban and rural Australia might beg to ­differ).

More recent NSW government data from last year showed luxury cars were just as likely to be purchased in Kellyville (164), Bankstown (111) and Concord (150) as Potts Point (129), Bellevue Hill (109) and Hunters Hill (115).

Specifically, Daley plans to raise stamp duty on new and used vehicles to $7 per $100 for cars over $100,000 and $9 per $100 for cars over $150,000.

This is in addition to the 33 per cent Luxury Car Tax and 10 per cent GST already levied on these cars.

Daley says his yacht tax would raise $240 million to pay for more nurses.

Daley described this as a “modest contribution” from “some of the wealthiest in our society”.

“This is fair,” he said.

The car and farming industries have already dubbed it a “LandCruiser tax”. Drivers in ­regional areas would see a LandCruiser as a necessity, not a luxury.

Daley pairs the car tax with a yacht tax to raise $240 million to help pay for a massive injection of nursing staff.

Investing in nurse-to-patient ratios is important. It’s good politics.

But playing a game of taxing aspirational Australians and trying to cast them as wealthy demons is class warfare at its worst and simply unnecessary.

Sydney is better than this.

None of this is to even mention the absurdity of Labor hurting border electorates like Tweed or Monaro, which it wants and needs desperately to win.

The same luxury car will now be cheaper in Queensland and Victoria, hurting dealerships in border towns.

The class warfare game is tired.

But the bigger mistake for Daley is stinging voters who are his own: Aspirational middle-class voters in Labor heartland who want to put their money into a car when they can’t ­afford a house.

Daley seems to have missed the part of the Robin Hood story where our hero aims his arrows at his enemies, not his own foot.