Tax take limit has become a kind of heresy for Chris Bowen
The Turnbull government may not have the stomach for full-throttle tax reform but it does like the sound of a speed limit on tax, The Australian yesterday:
Scott Morrison will formally enshrine the government’s tax limit of 23.9 per cent of GDP in the nation’s fiscal future by adopting it as official Coalition policy and writing it into this year’s budget in a move that would force a Labor government to either reverse it or dramatically cut its own spending.
As for the opposition, it’s suddenly shy on a speed limit on the tax take. Rachel Baxendale reports in The Australian yesterday:
Labor Treasury spokesman Chris Bowen has refused to commit Labor on a tax-to-GDP ratio …
Can’t be the same chap who, as treasurer, handed down the August 2013 economic statement:
The government’s medium-term fiscal strategy is to … keep taxation as a share of GDP, on average, below the level for 2007-08 (23.7 per cent) …
Back then, Bowen thought it such a clever idea he wanted to share it with everyone, The Australian Financial Review yesterday:
After losing government in 2013 … (Bowen) gave a speech in which he demanded the new Coalition government adhere to Labor’s then-tax cap of 23.7 per cent of GDP.
Meanwhile, the spirit of Christmas has crept back for Scott Morrison, Sydney Morning Herald, yesterday:
Voters will be promised billions of dollars in new spending on road and rail projects …
Not so long ago the Treasurer-Grinch wouldn’t have a bar of the Santa epithet, ABC News, April 17:
“I’m not Santa Claus,” Treasurer Scott Morrison clarified today, contradicting Acting Prime Minister Michael McCormack who gave an interview foreshadowing an exciting federal budget. “On May 8, as on December 25, Scott ‘Santa Claus’ Morrison will be announcing some goodies,” Mr McCormack told The Daily Telegraph. “I’m not bringing a bag of gifts in May and there won’t be any Christmas in May,” Mr Morrison said, hosing down the expectations Mr McCormack raised …
And infrastructure spending is investment in the economy, not pork barrelling. The Herald, yesterday:
(Morrison:) “It’s trying to bust congestion in our cities, which improves the productivity and performance in our cities. It is making rural and regional roads safer for people, to reduce some of the carnage that we’ve seen there. All of these things provide the platform for a stronger economy.”
In another world, yesterday ABC AM spruiked the reinvention of the cemetery as a cafe and leisure resort:
Jacqui Weatherill from Greater Metropolitan Cemeteries Trust wants to design more cemeteries to attract the living. “The design of some of the new cemeteries … is to engage with the community (so) that it doesn’t have the same perceptions.”
Once again, satire has prefigured reality. From Evelyn Waugh’s 1948 novel The Loved One:
Behold I dreamed a dream and I saw a New Earth sacred to HAPPINESS. There amid all that Nature and Art could offer to elevate the Soul of Man I saw the Happy Resting Place of Countless Loved Ones. And I saw the Waiting Ones who still stood at the brink of that narrow stream that now separated them from those who had gone before. Young and old, they were happy too. Happy in Beauty, Happy in the certain knowledge that their Loved Ones were very near …