It’s taxing for us all when economic illiteracy trickles down through ABC

ABC journalists never seem to see tax cuts or smaller government as desirable outcomes.

ABC chair Ita Buttrose. Picture: AAP

Journalists on the public payroll at the ABC never seem to see tax cuts or smaller government as desirable outcomes.

New chair Ita Buttrose spoke last month about the ABC’s unconscious bias. This column and critics such as Chris Kenny have pointed to the pro-Greens, anti-conservative political agenda of many ABC presenters. The news division’s misreading of the Adani coal issue at the May 18 election is just the latest example of such bias.

During that campaign and in debate since about the Morrison government’s proposed tax cuts, several leading presenters have showed they share the scepticism of ABC economics writer Emma Alberici about the benefits of cutting tax. Alberici wrote two pieces last year critical of the then Turnbull government’s planned company tax cuts.

She was on the same page as former treasurer and deficit dove Wayne Swan in questioning the theory of “trickle-down economics”, the idea popular on the right since the Reagan era that company tax cuts or cuts in top personal tax rates trickle down to more jobs and pay rises for workers. The left media’s take here on corporate and personal tax cuts has largely been driven by The New York Times and The Washington Post, both of which doubted the benefits of Donald Trump’s late-2017 tax cuts.

With the US economy, stockmarket and jobs booming, the left media now ­argues the benefits will be short term.

Here, hosts such as RN Breakfast’s Fran Kelly and AM’s Sabra Lane have been fleet-footed as they maintained criticism of the Coalition’s three-stage, $158 billion personal income tax cut plan passed in ­parliament last Thursday. Having cheered for Labor’s rejected $200bn, 10-year increase in taxes on capital gains, property investments and superannuation, Kelly et al quickly focused on new Labor leader Anthony Albanese’s plans to block the Morrison plan cutting top marginal rates in 2024.

Program hosts across ABC networks demanded to know how the Coalition could legislate cuts five years out. It was often left to ­Finance Minister Mathias Cormann to challenge the prevailing line by pointing out Swan had baked in Gonski school funding and National Disability Insurance Scheme spending a decade out without funding attached.

By last week, Kelly, Lane and ABC 7.30 political editor Laura Tingle had to pirouette on the back of a second Reserve Bank interest rate cut in a month last Tuesday to 1 per cent. RBA governor Philip Lowe said the economy needed stimulus, welcomed the tax cuts and argued for more spending on infrastructure. The ABC always supports more public spending, so that was easy. It then turned the governor’s support for tax cuts into a demand to know why the 2022 stage two and 2024 stage three cuts were not being brought forward.

No reporters I heard showed sufficient intellectual clout to point out what this newspaper’s economics editor Adam Creighton saw so clearly on June 29. The Morrison tax cuts are not really tax cuts at all. They are an innocuous way to hand back bracket creep.

Creighton argued the federal deficit had been balanced by bracket creep: workers on average wages were paying in 2009 dollar terms $100 a week more tax than they were a decade ago. Why no ABC advocacy journalism for these people? Why no questions to Cormann in his frequent RN and AM interviews demanding he justify taking an extra $100 a week from working families?

And why do ABC presenters keep asserting the 2024 cuts are for the rich? Stage three increases the threshold for the 32.5 per cent rate from $120,000 to $200,000, eliminates the 37 per cent rate and reduces the top rate to 45 per cent on incomes over $200,000 (previously $180,000).

These are hardly the incomes of the rich. There is a legitimate question about whether very high income earners — those in the millions — should face higher marginal rates. Creighton on January 8 advocated a Menzies government-style top rate above 65 per cent kicking in at incomes over $540,000.

But as former opposition leader Bill Shorten found out in a campaign chat with a coal export terminal worker in Gladstone, blue-collar workers with shift penalties on resources projects now make $200,000 a year.

If Labor and the ABC think that is rich, both have a lot of research and soul searching to do.

And soul searching is exactly what editorial leaders should do after federal elections. The ABC board and news executives could take a few lessons from the failures of their own coverage rather than constantly trot out polls to show everyone trusts the ABC. They used to trust the Commonwealth Bank too.

More senior ABC editorial staff need to question their easy assumptions, too often in line with Labor and the Greens, about tax and public spending.

The Coalition has not slashed spending on school education as the ABC keeps asserting. Education spending after Gonski 2.0 is at record levels.

Rather, ABC reporters should ask why this record funding is not producing better ­results in international tests. And reporters should never allow education advocates to claim governments spend more on private schools than public schools, which are a state responsibility. Total government funding from all levels of government per student in the state system is $13,000 per student, in the Catholic system $11,000, and in the private system $9000. Parents who pay private school fees and pay tax effectively subsidise public schools.

The NDIS, while it has teething problems, is indeed fully funded. Disability services were previously a state responsibility so a new national scheme will have teething troubles as advocates push for funding for disabilities not previously covered by state schemes. Reporters need some scepticism in dealing with advocates’ claims.

The federal government does not run hospitals, apart from those for veterans. ABC reporters should know this and should attribute blame for systemic issues to state health ministers where it belongs.

Total federal funding to the states for health has been rising by more than 6 per cent a year, compared with an average of 2.6 per cent for 2011-16.

On taxation and government spending, ABC reporters need to try to understand the nature of the aspirational outer suburban class. When the Coalition says Australians spend their own money more wisely than governments do, many voters agree.

Decades of mismanagement of programs centralised in Canberra should have made that clear to journalists.

Once the dreams of aspirational Australians were clear even to Labor politicians such as Bob Hawke and Paul Keating. Yet by Friday morning on Twitter, Waleed Aly in the Nine newspapers and on RN in an interview by Hamish Macdonald with Josh Frydenberg, the theme remained: Labor should have continued to resist the tax cuts.

The Coalition would have loved that. Imagine its advertising at the next election: “This is the same Labor Party that lost an election on tax and then tried to block your tax cuts”.