Rita Panahi: Labor’s politics of envy will kill off aspiration
Bill Shorten may paint himself as the champion of the underdog against the “big end of town” but his history suggests otherwise — and the war on society’s most productive members will not end well for Australia, writes Rita Panahi.
Rita Panahi
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If the bookies are right, and they usually are, Labor will have a comfortable victory come Saturday. And a Bill Shorten-led Labor will be the most radical Left-wing government in modern Australian politics.
If you think a government can’t do much damage in a single term, then you’re in for a surprise.
On the positive side, it will be good times for those of us in the media; chaos equals compelling content and I expect to be very busy over the next three years.
AUSTRALIANS SHOULD BE SEEKING CHANGE
LET’S VOTE WISELY AND GET ON WITH LIFE
But if you are a self-funded retiree, investor, small business operator or homeowner, then expect to endure some economic pain along with ever greater intrusions on your personal freedoms.
It’s one thing for Labor to embrace illiberal and economically reckless policies such as committing to renewables and emission targets that will drive up already high energy prices. But it’s another to run a campaign predicated on the politics of envy. The Opposition Leader may paint himself as the champion of the underdog against the “big end of town” but his history suggests otherwise.
Malcolm Turnbull made enormous mistakes during his prime ministership but he nailed it when he said of Shorten: “This is the most dangerous Left-wing leader of the Labor Party we have seen in generations. Labor’s so-called war on inequality is nothing more than a war on aspiration … Labor has never been more Left or more dangerous.”
Shorten has skilfully used class warfare to appeal to voters’ worst instincts. It’s all “ask not what you can do for your country, ask what your country (its long-suffering taxpayers) can do for you”. If you were to believe Labor and its ideological bedfellows, the Greens, the “working poor” are carrying the tax burden while the rich dodge their responsibilities.
But the reality is that the top 10 per cent of income earners pay about 50 per cent of all personal income tax collected in Australia, even after “generous tax concessions” or “handouts” as Labor calls them. The bottom 30 per cent of earners pay only about 5 per cent. And, that’s before you factor in government benefits.
Indeed the problem we have in this country isn’t the rich not paying their fair share but close to half the country’s “income units” paying no net tax.
Australia is the richest country in the world when looking at median wealth per adult, ahead of Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands, France and Canada.
The war on the most productive members of society, the ones doing the heaviest lifting in working hard, paying taxes, generating wealth and employing people will not end well for Australia.
It is a strategy that has been employed elsewhere in the world and it is all but guaranteed to leave the country poorer and more divided.
Labor’s demonisation of property owners is particularly cynical given how heavily property is taxed in this country, including state taxes such as stamp duty and land tax, and the fact that average income earners use property to build wealth.
About 70 per cent of Australians own or are paying off their homes.
If you’ve entered the property market, you have good reason to fear a Labor victory.
By effectively removing investors from the market, other than for new constructions, it is reducing every homeowner’s potential to achieve an optimum price for their biggest asset.
Labor’s property policies — ending negative gearing and dramatically increasing capital gains tax — will have intended and unintended consequences. Some of that impact is already being felt in the market, which has also been hit hard by financial institutions’ tightening of home loan criteria.
What risk-averse investor is going to buy an apartment off the plan when they know that, under Labor’s policy, they will not be able to sell it to another investor?
Experts are also predicting an increase in rents as we saw last time Labor implemented this harebrained policy.
You can’t tax your way to prosperity or wage growth. What any fair society should strive for is equality in opportunity. It is foolish to try to engineer equality in outcome.
As the US economist and writer Thomas Sowell said: “If you cannot achieve equality of performance among people born to the same parents and raised under the same roof, how realistic is it to expect to achieve it across broader and deeper social divisions?”
Former Australian deputy prime minister John Anderson warned this week that Labor’s embrace of toxic identity politics will further divide the nation.
“We are now turning ourselves into emocracies rather than democracies; it’s all about emotions, it’s all about feelings and Shorten is playing the Hillary Clinton identity politics game by appealing to people’s senses of grievance and victimhood,” he said.
When aggrieved people find that government can’t solve their grievances, they become more resentful of their fellow citizens.
— Rita Panahi is a Herald Sun columnist
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