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HOUSING AND WAGES
Scrap deductions, offer interest relief instead
After reading of yet another lacklustre scheme by a politician to “get people into housing” (“Labor vows to buy stake in homes to tackle crisis”, The Sunday Age, 1/5) that will inevitably increase housing prices in the process, it was particularly dispiriting to read in the property investment section a detailed guide on how to reduce the tax payable on the sale of an investment property that has increased threefold since 2016 (“We tripled our money but how can we cut $150,000 CGT bill?“, online, The Age, 30/4).
The list of deductible items was extensive and included cost of surveyors, auctioneers, accountants, cost of transfer and other items not available to actual homebuyers. But the kicker was an entitlement to a 50 per cent tax discount if you have owned the property for a year. How unfair is this to people struggling to get their first home?
Why not grandfather residential property investing and reallocate the tax savings from scrapping all these deductions into a real scheme for home buyers by allowing them to claim their first five years’ mortgage interest as a tax deduction? It doesn’t put the money into the pockets of developers, which buyer subsidies tend to do, and it helps speed up equity.
Stephen Farrelly, Donvale
Coles boss lets the cat out of the bag
Coles chief executive Steven Cain has let the cat out of the bag about the motives of big companies and politicians who want to resume business-as-usual high rates of immigration after COVID (“Coles boss calls for more immigration”, Business, 29/4).
In startlingly candid comments that should provide rich fodder for the election debate over falling real wages, Cain stated: “I would certainly like to see more focus on getting more immigration into the country because, eventually, we’ll see rising wages if there isn’t more supply.”
So there you have it: proof, as if needed, that big business sees immigration as a tool to suppress wages. By extension, this means adding to the growing gap between the affluent and the “working poor”.
Historically, high immigration has contributed richly to our nation. But in recent years we have seen the abject results of injudicious and excessive immigration: rampant urban sprawl, horrific city traffic problems and – as implied by the Coles boss – growing inequality via falling real wages.
Steven Cain’s amazing admission about immigration and wages has delivered a potential political gift to the struggling Anthony Albanese. Let’s see if the Labor leader has the smarts to grab it with both hands.
Tom Ormonde, Fitzroy North
Get back to housing’s basic mission
The entire national problem of stratospheric house prices must be considered relative to its causes; the conversion of housing from an essential and routine matter for the population, into a vehicle for speculation and wealth generation.
Until a government has the fortitude to scrap capital gains tax exemptions and negative gearing nothing will change.
Housing must be removed from the speculative investment market to restore its utilitarian value and not reflect the dog-eat-dog worst of capitalism.
Tim Wilson, Inverloch
Profits, not wages, are driving inflation
The price of just about everything in the economy can be broken down into labour costs, non-labour inputs and the “mark-up” of profits over the two other components.
It appears from data emerging in the United States and elsewhere that the recent spike in inflation has been disproportionately driven by increases in corporate profits.
In the case of Australia, this profit-gouging pattern is evident in the reality that profit’s share of the national cake remains at historically high levels.
The opportunity and need to increase the money in workers’ pockets through real wage increases rather than temporary and Band-Aid measures has never been greater and should be a top-level priority for the next Australian government.
Stewart Sweeney, Adelaide, SA
THE FORUM
Lamentably ill-prepared
Chip Le Grand’s article (“Campaign with false outlook and no big ideas ‘will fail us all’”, The Age, 30/4) encapsulates the politico/economic paradox Australia faces.
We have historically high debt levels, growing inflation, an effective unemployment rate of 8 per cent (in terms of hours worked), deteriorating public revenue and minuscule economic growth leading to stagnant wages growth.
This leaves us lamentably ill-prepared for the looming economic, social, health and environmental challenges which the expert contributors to the article articulate so clearly.
Historically Labor has been elected to correct the imbalances caused by too many years of conservative government: John Curtin 1941, Gough Whitlam 1972, Bob Hawke 1983, Kevin Rudd 2007.
Was the natural cycle subverted in 2019 by a media campaign against Bill Shorten for proposing precisely the actions that many commentators lament are missing from Anthony Albanese’s campaign?
Bill King, Camberwell
Be aware of the facts
The independent candidates, including Monique Ryan, don’t need me to defend them, but they do need us all, including the media, to sort fact from fiction and disinformation.
Your correspondent (“Think carefully”, Letters, 30/4) seems to consider Ryan and other independents are “single-issue” candidates, “who may lack interest in the broader policy sweep of federal responsibilities”. However, even a cursory glance at the original election material for Ryan lists six key policy areas and she has informed views on more.
There has been no chaos with minority governments but instead collaborative decision making. So yes, “think carefully”, but also be aware of the facts.
Peta Colebatch, Hawthorn
The good with the bad
A correspondent writes, tongue-in-cheek, “Anything positive that happens is due to good management by the Scott Morrison Coalition government, whereas anything bad that happens is beyond their control” (Letters, 1/5).
An interesting comment given that for many letter writers, anything bad that happens is due to Scott Morrison, and anything remotely positive is just serendipitous.
Deborah Morrison, Malvern East
Skewering misses the mark
Osman Faruqi has certainly skewered an imaginary bunch of Brunswick hipsters in his reflection on the recent defeat of Bunnings by residents in Brunswick (“Blocking a Bunnings? That’s sacrilege,” Comment, 30/4). However the hint that the case was not simply, as he puts it, “a misguided attack on a class of Australians” that Brunswick residents “don’t understand” should be that the residents won. Culture wars and nimbyism do not win VCAT cases.
I represented residents in this case, and it was won on strong planning grounds, including urban design concerns and the likelihood of impacts on adjacent tram and cycle routes.
It is telling that Faruqi mentions that he was able to walk to his old local Bunnings store in Collingwood. The Brunswick store was rejected largely because VCAT agreed that it was not an appropriate response to a pedestrian-focused centre. Hopefully the decision spurs retailers such as Bunnings to explore greater use of small pedestrian-oriented local stores, in preference to large car-oriented formats.
Stephen Rowley, Ascot Vale
More smoke and mirrors
A future Labor government taking a stake of up to 30 and 40 per cent respectively in existing and new house purchases would certainly shore up the ridiculously inflated cost of housing (“Labor vows to buy stake in homes to tackle crisis”, The Sunday Age, 1/5).
Participating buyers though, when they eventually pay out their mortgages, won’t own the houses outright. That is unless they’ve also managed to scrape together enough money “over time” to buy out the government’s share. Good luck with that. Typical of Australian politics, this latest major-party brainwave is all smoke and mirrors.
Lawrie Bradly, Surrey Hills
It’s not that simple
Caster Semenya is not transgender (“Freedom to exclude”, Letters, 30/4). Born a woman, raised a woman, she had forced testosterone testing during her elite competitive years and, much to her surprise, was diagnosed intersex, a condition where hidden internal testes produce excess testosterone.
So, women, born women, living their whole lives as women, can be banned from women’s sport or forced to take hormone blockers because their bodies naturally produce “too much” of one hormone. A transgender woman who has had hormone blockers for years or since pre-puberty may well not have the physiological advantage that a “natural” woman with hyperandrogenism might have.
This shows the complexity of defining women in sport by narrow biological parameters – and how hard it is to say what is “fair”. We wouldn’t condone gender-shaming a woman with “naturally” large hands or feet that might give her a sporting advantage, and the sports decision-making against women like Semenya, as well as transgender women without male levels of testosterone, exists on this continuum.
It’s actually complicated, not easy, and “blanket bans” miss this.
Molly Williams, Warrandyte
Scope for improvement
Speaking at a rally in Launceston, the prime minister said, “You may not like everything we’ve done, you may not like me that much, but that’s not the point. The point is you know what our plan is ... now is not the time to take a risk on what you don’t know.”
However, the Coalition’s default plan is always the status quo. They never do any innovation towards improving things in society or the environment. It’s only ever about facilitating big business to make more money, rather than balance and improving equity in society we have the rich getting richer and the rest getting bitter.
After nine years of this there is plenty of scope for improvement and that must include a federal ICAC with teeth. Perhaps it is the right time.
Robert Brown, Camberwell
If you can’t trust Hansard ...
The most disturbing part of the report on the promise of cheaper prescriptions (“Coalition promises to cut cost of medicines”, The Age, 30/4) was: “The Coalition had previously scrapped plans to announce a $10 reduction to the co-payment in the March budget, forcing two government ministers to ask Hansard to delete references to the plan from (their) speeches to parliament.” The speeches were delivered but the record, i.e. Hansard, will not show what was said.
Is this proper? Surely what is said in parliament must be recorded and if wrong corrected at a later date without deletion. If this doesn’t happen then what credibility does Hansard have?
Adrian Tabor, Point Lonsdale
Nothing to josh about
At Kew junction on Saturday I was approached by two Liberal spruikers handing out Josh Frydenberg bags. I told them I was a Liberal voter of 54 years, but was not voting for Josh as three times in as many years I wrote to his office asking what the government was doing to free Julian Assange. Each time I received a robot generated email telling me how important my correspondence is and someone would follow up – it never happened.
I also went on to tell the two of them that I wanted a local member who was interested in the electorate and hearing from people residing therein. The response I got was “Josh does a lot for the Guide Dogs” – how funny is that?
The “piece de resistance” in this story is that one of the spruikers finally responded by saying, “You have obviously made up your mind, so don’t waste our time.”
That says it all and confirms my decision to vote for Monique Ryan.
Mike Mack, Kew
Own the decision
Rather than the Reserve Bank striving to be apolitical and doing what it believes the economy needs (“The cost of living is soaring, but higher interest rates won’t help”, Business, Ross Gittins, 30/4), it can (and should) be unequivocally made so, by the government of the day determining official interest rates.
This is for the same reasons as Daniel Andrews returned the final say over COVID regulations back to his government: in issues like interest rates that have fundamental impacts on us all, the government of the day must listen to the RBA, look at its own party principles and aims, and the present threats to and needs of the country as a whole and then take – and wear – a decision.
Only then will the government, and the voters, be justified in judging the efficacy of the decisions made.
Peter Deerson, Mornington
He would be delighted
In November 1994, The Age published a letter from a Kooyong resident, my uncle Ken Moritz, during the Kooyong byelection campaign. Ken invited his fellow Kooyong voters to act courageously and “send to Canberra a person of independent views”.
He may have been disappointed but certainly not surprised to find that Kooyong did not heed the call atthat time.
Had he not passed some time ago now, I think he would be delighted to move around the streets of Kooyong today: resplendent, as they are, in teal, green, blue and a little red. We are no longer “good old reliable Kooyong”, rather the “thinking, demanding, unpredictable, prickly electorate with political clout” foreshadowed by Ken in 1994.
Kooyong is celebrating democracy with strength and vigour, and I love it. Bring on the election night party: Kooyong’s eyes will be glued to the count.
Laurie Atkinson, Kew
Keep profits out if it
Thank you for your May Day article, Jon Faine (“Lost in the care labyrinth”, Opinion, 1/5). No social services should be run for profit, including health and education.
Those working in these fields should be doing it for love as well as money, and what is spent on administration should not exceed a set percentage of the funds allocated for these vital services.
Christine Weatherhead, Glen Waverley
AND ANOTHER THING…
The campaign
I would like to remind your correspondent (“Think carefully”, Letters, 30/4) that when you vote for the Liberal Party you are voting for a Coalition government and a vote for Josh Frydenberg is also a vote for Barnaby Joyce.
Dave Robson, Port Melbourne
Credit:
Peter Costello, when introducing the baby bonus scheme, famously said, “Have one for mum, one for dad and one for the country.” The Coalition is now offering $10 off contraceptive pills. Go figure.
Alan Inchley, Frankston
Peter Dutton gets my vote as a scarecrow.
John McCaffrey, Brighton
Could it be that Anthony Albanese’s greatest problem is that he is basically just a decent person?
Ian Maddison, Parkdale
The big winners in this election must be the billboard and corflute manufacturers, especially in Kooyong (aka Frydenborough, aka Teal Town).
Vikki O’Neill, Ashburton
Remember, whatever the Coalition promises, they could have done any time in the past nine years.
Tim Durbridge, Brunswick
Maybe if the NDIS stood for the National Distillery Improvement Scheme it would be able to attract more money from Scott Morrison.
Chris Del Prete, Pascoe Vale South
The economy
Is this the inflation rate we need to have?
Peng Ee, Castle Cove, NSW
Furthermore
Delighted to see Paul Guerra is “over the constant negativity” about the Melbourne CBD (“Here’s how to save the CBD”, Comment, 30/4) – given that he has been a major exponent of it for the past three years.
Geoff Wescott, Northcote
Finally
As part of my exercise program I tried to climb up to the moral high ground, but it was full. The ABC and the Greens beat me to it.
Penny Hamilton, Shepparton
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