Steve Price: Anthony Albanese is still a class warfare warrior at heart
Our Prime Minister is a multi-millionaire — with a $4.3m beach house — but despite his own enormous wealth, he is now attacking anyone who has worked hard and accumulated a healthy super fund.
Opinion
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Prime Minister Anthony Albanese likes to remind all of us that he grew up in council housing raised by a single mum.
He wears his humble beginnings as a badge of honour – as he should – and points out that he is an example of how anyone could become PM.
That same Anthony Albanese is now also a multi-millionaire.
He has a property portfolio which includes a Sydney house and a $4.3m beach house on the NSW central coast. You can add to that a taxpayer funded pension estimated to be worth $400,000 a year – tax free for life when he leaves Parliament. Let me repeat … that’s tax-free forever and if he passes before his fiancé, Jodie Haydon, she gets half of that pension also tax free for the rest of her life.
Plus of course, at 62 years-old, and with a minimum guaranteed extra three, probably six, years in Parliament, at 68-years-old he could still get another job plus the pension.
A sweet deal. And the PM got this multi-million-dollar package because he entered Parliament before 2004 and is due what’s called a defined benefits pension.
Post-2004, elected MP’s have a super contribution scheme like other Australians with one major difference, and guess who benefits most — you’re right, the politicians of course.
They, like you, can contribute to their own super but then you and I, the taxpayers, top up these personal payments each pay day with an extra 15.4 per cent. That’s a scandal they never want to talk about.
Let’s be clear here … a no-name backbencher who never amounts to much but is in the right faction and keeps getting preselected and re-elected gets this deal. To make you feel worse, that backbenchers’ base salary starts at $225,742 a year and last June they were gifted a 3.5 per cent wage rise when average Australians haven’t had a pay rise in years.
No wonder these people want to be in politics, and don’t buy that sob story about how tough it is spending so much time in Canberra. The newly-returned Labor government has decided they will only sit for 11 weeks for the rest of this year.
How pathetic. How would you like to be paid a quarter of a million dollars a year and only need turn up and sit in parliament for less than three months.
But back to our humble working-class PM. This is the same bloke who endorses yet another attack on Australians who have managed to amass a retirement fund of their own through hard work, without any taxpayer contributions.
Australians, since the mid-1990s, have been told they had to put their salaries into super by law, so that the Australian government wouldn’t have to pay them an aged pension. Ever since financial mismanagement has meant both sides of politics have gazed on the superannuation nest eggs of average Australians and worked out ways to get their hands on it.
Former Treasurer Scott Morrison was the worst. In his budget of 2016 – in a moment of madness – he decided that $1.6m was a lot of super and changed the laws to tax earnings over that figure. I abused him in Parliament house that night about ruining my planned retirement and in his smug way he just laughed.
Now Labor declares any superannuation fund with more than $3m in it needs to not only be taxed on earnings above that amount — double from 15 per cent up to 30 per cent — but the tax will be calculated on assets not even sold.
These are the so-called unrealised gains changes that are sending shivers through self-managed super funds, especially those held by farmers and small businesses.
It’s typical of a political party that sneers at aspiration, with hard left leaders like Albanese who still, despite his own wealth, want to attack anyone who has worked hard and paid their taxes and accumulated some wealth.
Most of those people – unlike Albanese – have employed people, started businesses, paid every tax levied upon them unfairly and have held down real jobs, not political appointments.
I said the same thing last week about the incompetent Victorian Labor leadership of Jacinta Allan.
Our rich PM will have been a federal MP for 30 years next year. He has never employed anyone, paid a cent of payroll tax or even filled out a BAS statement or coughed up for work cover insurance or any of the dozens of taxes and levies employers are slugged with.
He joined the Labor party in 1979 as a 16-year-old and he is a lifer, a party man whose main claim to fame — and it’s a pretty good one — is winning two elections including possibly the biggest Labor victory ever on May 3 this year.
But he’s no leader in the vein of Hawke or Keating, not a reformer, and beyond wanting to divide Australia along racial lines with his failed Voice campaign, what does he stand for? Bashing people he considers rich is I guess one attribute the Left and Greens would support.
Albanese during the election banged on with a slogan-type wish that we make more things in Australia without any real evidence he can make that happen.
He supports ditching fossil fuels like coal while not convincing anyone that he knows how we are going to do that in the timeframe he is committed to.
He is a fan of big migration but has no real answers on where we are going to house the millions of people he’s bringing in.
The housing estate kid from Marrickville has done very well for himself but at heart is still a class warfare warrior, suspicious of other people doing well.
As he once said, his enjoyment is fighting Tories.
He certainly did that on May 3, in a thumping way. He now needs to realise he needs to be PM for all Australians, including wealthy ones.
After 53 years working in a volatile industry like the media I’ve magaged to put together a reasonable self-managed super fund. If the government’s proposed legislative changes pass, I could be affected.
Likes
— Woodside petroleum gets the green light to extend its gas production on WA’s north-west shelf until 2070.
— Sensible banning of a pair of transgender netballers by Riddell District Netball League.
— Old favourite the late-night Supper Inn Chinese restaurant in Celestial Lane always a winner.
— Cheaper fuel this week with even premium unleaded around $1.70 a litre
Dislikes
— Machete law changes having no impact on sales when its magistrates and bail that need toughening up.
— Faceless Victorian Agriculture Minister Ros Spence – a lawyer – missing in action during a history making drought.
— Talented Liberal women like Sarah Henderson and Jacinta Nampijinpa Price dumped and demoted in reshuffle.
— Continued use of indigenous names for AFL teams meaning you don’t know who is playing who.
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