Sorry treasurer, your weasel words don’t cut it. You are embarked on a major and punishing broken promise every bit as clear-cut and utterly undeniable as Julia Gillard’s “there will be no carbon tax under a government I lead”.
Before the election, both you and the prime minister said repeatedly, to the effect: there will be no changes to superannuation under a government I, Albo, lead and in which I, Jimbo, play fiscal fiend.
There was no asterisk, no qualification to the promise; no, well, that is, apart from “tidying up some things”. The promise was absolute and delivered repeatedly: there will be no changes.
The reason for the absolutism was blindingly obvious: you were both terrified of a replay of 2019, when then leader Bill Shorten was running with - and losing with - abolition of negative gearing and winding back dividend imputation.
Back then there was an arrogant assumption the election was unlosable – all a bit like those over-confident players on Channel 10’s Survivor who get ambushed and booted with an immunity idol in their pocket.
Is that an election immunity idol I see in your pocket Bill? No, it’s a losing election promise.
This week there have been two lines of denial.
From the PM: how can anyone say we’ve broken a promise, when we haven’t done anything. Yet.
From the treasurer: well, we don’t plan on making any major changes; or, that they won’t much impact most people.
Both false; and changes that will start to come as soon as the budget in May.
It was telling, very telling, that the treasurer, speaking to Neil Mitchell on Melbourne’s 3AW, refused to rule out changes in the budget. Indeed, Chalmers has explicitly said that the “cost of tax concessions” was “in his sights” ahead of the budget; his offsider Stephen Jones has said we are “clearly” thinking about caps on them.
These changes – bluntly, increased taxes on super - are clearly going to pivot around the seeming anodyne motherhood statement that super should provide for a “dignified retirement in an equitable and sustainable way”.
There’s massive tax-hiking benefit-slashing wriggle room in those words “dignified”, “equitable” and “sustainable”.
Just exactly what Labor is aiming at is actually hiding in plain sight, even if Albo and Jimbo don’t or won’t see it and certainly won’t admit it. Both Chalmers and Jones have been talking all week about the costs of tax concessions for super being too high. That by 2050 they’d actually be costing the budget more than the age pension.
Duh: don’t they understand that’s exactly the purpose of super.
The more people you get off the pension and into their own self-funded retirement, the smaller will be the pension bill.
In an ideal future, you’d hope to get the pension bill down to zero or as near as possible.
The second critical point about the supposed high bill for super is that if you want to cut it, you have to cut concessions to the great mass of people.
You ain’t getting big hunks of the supposed $50bn-a-year cost just from the fat cats.
You could close all the $100m super funds and you’d save less than a billion.
As for that term ‘tax concession’; they are every bit a ‘tax concession’ as the tax-free threshold is a ‘concession’ because it’s not charging the 19c of the next tier.
Just as those on the 32.5c tax tier are getting a ’concession’ because they are not paying the top rate of 45c.
Indeed, just as everyone is getting the huge ‘concession’ of not paying 100 per cent on every dollar of income.
That tax ‘concession’ is costing the budget hundreds of billions of dollars a year! Better start aiming for that, Jimbo.
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